Involuntary Man's Laughter
by J-Horror Girl
Summary: The Joker/Jay and Grace/The Grudge turn up in the Arkham gameverse and sub for Batman. Now it's Heath!Joker vs. Game!Joker and Grace vs. Harley. Who will win? In the process of moving from Can't Get You Out of My Head. Was briefly 'Crashing The Party'.
1. The Joker is Miffed

A/N: Um, okay. This is a story within the story, something outside of the current Jay and Gracie storyline, which I'm blocked on. In fact, it is technically a crossover with the Arkham Asylum game in which Jay and Grace wind up in that world. So it will be Joker vs. Joker and Gracie vs. Harley, not to mention all the other fun characters from our favorite home for the mentally disturbed, IE: Victor Zsasz, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Bane and Killer Croc, plus a supporting cast of some several hundred Joker henchmen, Asylum inmates and staff, with a cameo by Commissioner Gordon. But no Batman. Probably not, anyway. I've been blocked for so long and written nothing at all and I had to do something. So I hope all of my readers will enjoy this look at them from a different perspective.

I own nothing and am not getting paid for this.

* * *

The Joker was miffed. No,it was worse that that. He was irked, and possibly on the way to being ticked off. Here He had set up a _delightful_ play date with Batsy—even if Batsy didn't know it yet—with lots and lots of fun surprises in store including violent death and ten-foot tall monsters—and Batsy had not shown. Moreover, the Gotham PD had shown a little smarts for once, and actually caught Him. Caught Him! Yes, He had been trying to make it easy, but that was so the _Bat_ would be sure to catch Him, not the Keystone Kops. So now He was sitting on His ass in the vehicle they used to transport inmate/patients to Arkham Island, and quite uncomfortable thanks to having His hands cuffed behind him rather than in front.

Maybe He shouldn't have killed His lawyers after all. They might be useful in a situation like this, but that was all blood under the bridge at this point. Literally… And the transport was not only stuffy, it was smelly and hot. He was offended, and said as much to the guard.

"Shut up," the man explained.

This really was annoying, and worse, boring. However, something did come along to alleviate the tedium, at least momentarily. Someone banged on the side of the transport. "Two more for the bughouse," said a voice.

The guard slid the door open. "What'd they do?" he asked.

"Ran afoul of the Bogue-47s," said the police officer who stood there, naming a famously vicious independent street gang. Independent in the sense that they didn't belong to one of the many supervillains, that is. Chemical dependencies were another thing entirely.

"And they're still alive?" the guard asked.

"Yeah." The officer helped a young woman into the vehicle, making sure she didn't bump her head—not out of chivalry, but because her hands were also cuffed behind her. "Six of the Bogues are dead."

"Seven," the young lady corrected.

"There were only six bodies," the officer told her.

"Seven dead, though. My shoes—well, they were hungry." The Joker looked at her feet. The transport could easily hold twenty-four, but before this He had had it to himself, and He had taken the padded rear seat rather than the uncushioned benches at the front. She was not so far away that He couldn't see her, though. She had on a pair of pink high-heeled shoes. Even in the half-light inside the transport, the color was astonishing, like a couple of exotic flowers that happened to be shoe-shaped. _Well, of course. They're lady-slippers_. He giggled at the thought.

"Uh-huh. According to her, her shoes ate somebody, so she's going to be your guest for a while. And as for him--you're not gonna _believe_ who he thinks he is....." Whatever the officer whispered to the guard, it must have been hilarious--at least to them.

"So what are their names?" asked the guard.

"No idea. She didn't have any ID or anything, not even a purse or a cell phone. Nothing in his pockets but knives and a little money."

"You, uh, forgot the _lint_," said a slightly nasal male voice.

"Nothing in the system on them either. It's like they don't exist."

"So what_ is_ your name?" the guard asked.

"Uhmmmm, lemme think--James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree." said the male voice.

The girl came back at him with another line, "'Took great care of his mother. Although he was only three'. It's a poem by A.A. Milne--he came up with Winnie-the-Pooh."

"Riiiight." said the guard. "Okay. John Doe. What about you?"

"I'd claim I was Kayako Saeki if it wouldn't go right over your head." she replied. The Joker looked at her more closely. She had the shiny, straight black hair He associated with Asians, but He couldn't see her face.

"Jane Doe it is." said the guard. "Okay, load him in." The officer shoved the young man in, the guard slid shut the panel separating the passenger compartment from the rest of the vehicle, and a moment later the transport's engine rumbled to life.

As the vehicle made a turn in the parking lot, the young man said, "I don't want to sit up here. Let's go to the back." Changing seats in a moving vehicle was awkward even when not handcuffed behind the back, but they got up anyway. "Crap, somebody's already there--."

"Jay--do you see?" The girl did not finish the sentence. She didn't have to. Everybody knew Him on sight. The Joker sat up a little straighter and waited for them to express their honor at being in His Glorious presence. Or cower in fear, which was even better.

...but they didn't. "Uh--isn't this interesting?" asked the young man rhetorically.

They sat down next to each other about a third of the way down from the Joker. Now that He could see them more clearly, He quickly dismissed the boy as boring and the girl as having potential. Despite the tasteful pattern of fresh bloodstains, the boy's suit had no style, no style at all, being grey and very ordinary. Nothing like His majestic purple suit or His orange waistcoat, let alone His natty white spats. Not everyone could be gifted with a sartorial sense like His, though, and He was a big enough man to feel pity for those less fortunate on that front. Poor young man, to be so dull so soon.

On second glance, however, the Joker percieved that the young man's hair was tinged with green. Nothing at all like His sleek, sophisticated emerald locks, but better than just plain brown. The girl showed off some shapely leg below the frothy hem of her dress, which was a rather attractive sour-apple-candy green, but most of her face was obscured by her hair. Her mouth looked bruised, but her demeanor was not that of a cowed victim. If she had been in a fight, she had not come out the loser.

If He was studying them, they were studying Him. The boy giggled irritatingly. "Are you, uh, wearing _make-up_?" he asked.

"Are you?" retorted the Joker. Come to think of it, there _was _something odd about the texture of the young man's face.

"I asked first," retorted the youngster (the Joker judged him to be about fifteen years younger than he).

"So you did... The answer is no. Perfection cannot be improved upon, after all." He lifted His chin so they could admire His profile better.

"On the other hand, there are certain lilies that could use a bit of gilding." murmured the young woman derisively.

The Joker snapped His head back down and glared at her. "And some people could use a belt in the kisser." he stated with a growl.

"Too late!" she declared in a cheerful voice, her tongue flicking quickly over her split and discolored lips.

"But there's always room for more--what are you doing?" His attention had been hijacked by the young man, who had started to squirm in his seat, chafing first one side of his face and then the other against the shoulders of his suit. His skin was peeling off in strips--no, it was thin pieces of latex or something like it, stuck down with some kind of adhesive and then daubed with make-up.

"To answer your question," His face now bare, the insolent puppy locked his eyes on the Joker's while turning his face, the better to show off the messy scars which pulled his mouth into a perpetual smile, "I _was_ wearing make-up. You, uh, wanna know how I got these scars?"

"I will admit to being mildly interested. You may go on," said the Clown Prince of Crime magnanimously.

"Uh. Okay," The young man grimaced, looked down and scuffed his foot along the transport floor in boyish embarrassment. "It's kinda stupid, actually. I had this normal childhood, see? Brothers and sisters, big yard, lots of friends. We used to play make-believe a lot. So one day, we decide we're going to play pirates. And what do pirates do when they attack a ship? They swing over on ropes with these, uh, cutlasses between their teeth. So I got this knife from the kitchen--the big butcher knife, actually--Thing is, I never noticed they put them in their mouths sharp side _out_, so when I tripped...." He winced.

The Joker didn't. "I don't believe a word of it."

"Suit yourself."

"Why didn't your parents have your face sewn up properly, then?" the Joker pressed.

The boy shrugged. "No health insurance."

"Is he telling the truth?" The Joker turned to the girl.

"I've heard him tell the story of how he got his scars many times." she stated. "He always tells the truth."

"Yes, but do you?" the Joker asked. He was beginning to suspect that these two were in the supervillain game, too. They had moved so smoothly despite the restraints, and there were other signs. He had never encountered them before, but there were so many--they weren't greenhorns, for those who were entirely new to it tended to swagger brashly, insecure young bucks trying to take down the King Stag. The cool effrontery these two displayed said they were at least middleweights. They weren't Punch and Jewelee, he knew them... Were there any other couple supervillain duos other than himself and Harley? "Who are you, anyway?"

"Me?" she asked. "I'm nobody."

"Then I'm nobody's fool." the young man returned immediately. "And I _like_ to hold a grudge...." He clearly thought that was rather funny, because he laughed, but the girl made a huffy sound.

Then suddenly she was sitting very close to the Joker. He flinched a trifle, instinctively. He hadn't seen her get up and move. Not that she had scared Him, for nothing scared Him. He was startled, that was all. She leaned closer. Her face was still mostly hidden by her hair, and she swayed with the motion of the transport. "He really isn't wearing any make-up and his hair isn't dyed. Also, he doesn't smell right," she said.

"Well! There's no call to get personal here!" the Joker said, offended.

"What, uh, do you mean by 'not right'?" asked the young man.

"Not entirely human," she said, slowly. "There's acetone...and carbon tetrachloride, I think--and it can't be cleaning solvant from his clothes because _that_ suit hasn't seen the inside of a dry cleaner's shop since the day it was made."

"Pfah!" the Joker exclaimed. For a moment He was simply 'he', in the lower-case, as He glanced down at His suit, which was patched in places with fabric that didn't quite match, and mottled with stains of various kinds in others. The fabric flower pinned to it was limp, bedraggled, and His shoes were scuffed. An uneducated, unenlightened person (such as this girl) might, on first glance, see Him as...shabby. And old. And ridiculous--not in a good way either,with His long spindly limbs and flamboyant mannerisms. The boy still had his eyes locked on the Joker's, with an infuriatingly calm expression on his face. Very few people could keep their calm in His presence, and He did not like it. He began to think of ways He would like to kill them, separately and together. "Remind Me to kill you very slowly, when I get around to it."

"Too late!" she said, cheerfully, as she had when He mentioned punching her in the face.

"These cuffs will be coming off soon enough. Just you wait....Again, I ask--who _are_ you?"

"Now this is where it gets, uh, complicated," the young man said. "I prefer to keep things simple and this one evades explanation anyhow. I am the Joker, and this is my lovely wife, the Grudge."

The Joker nearly laughed His last meal onto the transport floor. "You? You're the Joker? With that drab suit and your pink skin and your hair that's a poor excuse for green? You're saying that you--you! are Me? No wonder they're sending you to Arkham! And they call Me crazy! This is just too good!"

"I, uh, never said I was you. I said I was _the Joker_. In another universe, that is. This suit is what I wear when I, uh, like to be incognito, although Gracie sometimes gives the game away. As for the hair and the make-up--is that _all_ that makes you the Joker? Just a case of hypopigmentation and hair that, uh, looks an awful lot like a lawn divot on top of your head?"

"You know what they say," added the Grudge, or Gracie, or Kayaky Sack or whatever she had said earlier, "Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone." That did it. He really was going to have to kill them in some painful and humilliating way, and an idea was beginning to form in his mind.

"And there's another reason why you couldn't possibly be The Joker," He said to the impostor, the pretender, "because little wifey there would know better than to run her mouth like that. It could be _fatal_, you know."

"That's my sassy girl. Gracie wouldn't be Gracie if she wasn't snarky," the pretender replied.

"The two of you ought to have a joke-off to see who wins. That's spelled J-O-K-E, not J-E-R-K, so spare me the smutty comments," suggested the so-called wife.

"Say--that's an excellent idea!" the Joker exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm. "You see, I had this wonderful party planned out for Bats, and I was absolutely devastated when he stood Me up. Months of planning down the drain--but now that the two of you have turned up, maybe it won't have to be canceled after all."

The faux Joker and the Grudge exchanged glances. "Sounds like, uh, fun," said the imitation. "What do you say, Sassy Girl?"

"As if I had a prayer of stopping you," she retorted. "What kind of party is this--why am I even asking? It wouldn't be fun for you if there weren't a double digit body count at the end of the night."

"No, no, it's a good question--Let's see. This was My latest, and greatest plan to crush both Gotham and Batman for good, so I'm just going to go right ahead with My plans while _you_ try and stop Me. How does that work for you?"

"Hmmmm," said the impostor. "You'll have lots of henchmen on your side, plus all your plans and plenty of toys, while I'll be all on my lonesome except for Gracie here, without even a knife to my name. Sounds fair enough to me."

"Splendid! This is going to be such fun!" The transport had passed the Asylum gates and crossed the bridge to the island. Slowing as it drew near the front doors of Admissions, it came to a halt with a sigh of exhaust fumes. The sound of the door opening was a snap remarkably like the breaking of a spine.

* * *

Kayako Saeki is the name of the ghost in the Grudge movies. Tomorrow I will be working like mad on getting caught up on reviews. See you soon!


	2. Invisibility

I really shouldn't go giving Jay ideas. He comes up with quite enough of them on his own. 'And how do you envision this working?' I asked him mentally as the guard ordered me out of that hideous vehicle.

_Well, he planned all this out with the idea that he was going up against Batman, didn't he? Batsy, as everybody knows, doesn't kill. Hell, he doesn't even do the kind of damage that lasts. It's one thing to throw guys against someone when they know the worst that's going to happen is a headache, a few bruises, maybe some cracked ribs. So when his expendables realize that I take no prisoners, they're not going to have the same enthusiasm. They'll break_.

'I'm concerned about **you** getting broken ...Jay, this is not the Arkham we know.' I looked around at the grounds of a place I had never seen before, getting my bearings. Our Arkham was a sizeable institution in the middle of the Narrows, which was arguably the worst neighborhood in Gotham. This Arkham was set on an island, not far from the Gotham lighthouse in the bay—I could see its beam revolving in the half-light of dusk. Behind the transport was a long drive lined with leafless sycamore trees—it was Autumn here, the air had the bite of October—leading down to a skeletal wrought iron fence and gate flanked by a pair of mournful Symbolist angels holding lanterns in each hand. To the left was the hollow shell of a decayed building braced with girders. To the right was a stone outcropping topped with—a greenhouse? No, it was too fancy for a simple greenhouse. It was a Victorian era conservatory. Above and behind that was a clock tower, part of some other large building.

Directly before me was a red brick building circa about 1925, industrial-Art Deco in style. It looked like a factory, but above the door were the words 'Intensive Treatment' spelled out in long metal letters, some of which were askew or reversed. What I found most sinister about it were the towering smokestacks which sprouted from the building. Something about them reminded me of concentration camp incinerators.

The guard who had ridden shotgun on us from the police station was now telling Jay to come out. "Wha—what happened to your face?" he asked, doing a double take at the scars, and small wonder. It must have seemed as though they had magically appeared during the trip.

Jay' brow furrowed in thought. "Uh—Contact dermatitis," he said, nodding toward the remaining prisoner in the vehicle. "I'm allergic to slapstick."

The guard scoffed. "Guess _everybody_ thinks they're a joker these days."

"I couldn't have put that better myself," growled the Other Joker from the depths of the transport.

Jay was directed to stand to the side by me while four security guards in flak vests and helmets with face shields, their weapons at the ready, flanked the transport. "All right, Joker. Come on out, and don't make any sudden moves." snarled a fifth guard. The odor of whisky hung about him in a cloud, almost visible as a haze in the air. Curiously, he had a long, high-ridged scar running down his face from forehead to cheek, bisecting a dead eye, white and bleary blue. Why would he not bother replacing it with a glass eye?

'That guy is a squealer,' Jay said ominously. 'He may squeal in the opposite direction, but I can still tell and he's still a squealer.' Which did not bode well for the officer's life expectancy.

Other Joker stepped out of the transport like a dignitary emerging from a plane, a conquering general returning home, and greeted the alcoholic guard like he was an old college friend. "Hey, Frank-kay! How's the wife and kids? You miss me?"

"Shut up, clown! There's a lot of people in there who want to have a word with you." The guard stepped within the Other Joker's cordon of guards to clap the clown on the shoulder, roughly, propelling him toward a upright restraint board, two more guards at the ready to strap him down.

"Really, I don't mind walking!" Other Joker huffed as the guard, (his ID badge read 'F. Boles') spun him around, removed the cuffs, and slammed him in place. The orderlies fastened him down with alacrity, and he admonished them with good cheer. "Not so tight, boys. You'll crease the suit!" Said suit was past creasing, as several of the seams were holed and frayed, not to mention solid colored patches had been sewed on top of the original striped fabric, and it was never that great to begin with. But even though Other Joker had a chin like a frying pan handle, although he had body odor like a chemistry lab sink, although his hair did look like a fake grass welcome mat, for all that was wrong and innately ludicrous about him, he had both malevolence and charisma crackling around him like lightning around Frankenstein's monster.

He also had that hearty, falsely cheerful voice common to all children's entertainers, only developed to a degree of such offensiveness that I wanted to hit him in the head with a rock just to shut him up. I communicated as much to Jay, who replied, _Don't let me stop you._

'Um--later maybe. It would draw too much attention right now_.'_

The doors of the Intensive Treatment building opened like the airlocks of a spaceship, and Joker was wheeled in like nothing so much as a dolly of beer. Despite the restraints which bound him, the four armed guards still covered every angle, ready to fire. We were ordered to fall in behind, with one guard behind us. A short, stocky older man barred the way, his hands gripping a cane as if for protection. Other Joker sang out, "Hey, Sharpie! Love what you've done to the place!"

"That's _Warden Sharp_ to you," the man snapped. "Get this filthy degenerate out of here! Who are these two?" he asked as we passed.

"Here for evaluation," said the transport guard.

"But..." Sharp looked from Jay to Other Joker and back again, his brow furrowing. "Oh, I don't care. Send them to the appropriate department. As for the Joker—I want him securely locked away this time. Otherwise he'll start to compromise my campaign for mayor." He continued to bluster as our grotesque little parade passed the portals and headed for the heart of darkness.

Once inside the building, a short dark hall opened out into an enormous space which made the factory comparison even more apt. It was larger than a cathedral, and at least four stories high. A sort of bunker the size of a house squatted in the center of the space, pierced by a tunnel large enough to drive a car through. Jay and I waited while a lift platform lowered the Other Joker and his guards down to the lowest level, and I looked around some more.

'Someone should have told the architect to lay off the opium pipe', I told Jay. 'Who puts huge gargoyles _inside_ a building_?'_

_I like them_, he disagreed. _They remind me of Bats_.

'He'd feel right at home here, wouldn't he?'

_Speaking of whom..._

_'_Yes_?'_

_It's gonna be your job to do all the heroic stuff. I can't be bothered with it and I know you care about that kind of thing_.

'Such as?'

_Rescuing people. Protecting innocent bystanders, yadda yadda_.

'Oh, **that** stuff. You're only suggesting that because then I won't be there objecting when you kill his henchmen.'

The platform returned, and we stepped on. Further down the huge chamber, Other Joker was going through the tunnel, which turned out to be a very large and comprehensive scanner. His voice carried back to us, "I miss the good old cavity search. It was so much more personal."

'I don't think I should go through that thing'. I told Jay. Given that I was a ghost who could only seem tangible and alive, if I were to go through the scanner, it would almost certainly pick up readings that were incompatible with human life, which would then mean that people would get overexcited. I would not want to expose them to unnecessary stress, especially since it seemed the night to come would get very stressful very quickly.

_And I don't think my shoes should go through it either_. Jay was telling the truth when he said he didn't have _**a **_knife to his name. He had two knives, which the Gotham Police had missed because they were built into his shoes, spring-loaded at the toes. Many quality handmade leather shoes still have a heavy steel shank running through them, and that was all Jay's shoes seemed to be, but this car-wash sized scanner looked to be more comprehensive. If all hell were about to break loose, as it very likely would, Jay would need his shoes. The only problem was that although I could pull a ghostly vanishing, I couldn't bring his shoes with me. I could be invisible, but not tangible at the same time, and to carry something I had to be physically tangible.

I am not a very powerful creature, but even if I only have a handful of supernatural tricks, I make do.

'Okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to bug out in a moment, nip around to some corner where there isn't a security camera aimed at me, and come back looking like one of the medical staff. Step out of your shoes now and leave them behind for me to come and collect.'

_'Right...'_

However, there is more than one way of being invisible. There is the kind where no one can see you, and then there's the kind where no one notices you. At a moment when no one's eyes were on me, I disappeared into thin air, and went off to find some privacy to take on the_ other_ kind of invisibility. Any urban or suburban medical facility of size today has on staff at any given time half a dozen or more female nurses, lab techs, phlebotomists, assistants, etc. from a foreign country. They range in age from their twenties to their forties, and their skin can come in any shade of brown, from beige to mahogany. Ethnically ambiguous, they may be from Peru or the Philippines or Pakistan, from Thailand or Trinidad and Tobego, and they're in America because the money is better than in the best hospital back home, and they have parents, siblings, children to support. Human resources offices love to hire them because they work very hard. All of them are functionally fluent in English, although they speak it with an accent. I could pass for Hispanic, if you squinted a little, my skin was beige, and I could fake an accent.

When I walked back around the corner seconds later I was wearing what looked like standard-issue mint green scrubs and sensible square-toes nurse's shoes. My hair was French-braided off my face in a style which would have taken half an hour to do, and my face was clean and unmarked. I wore an Arkham staff ID with my picture and the name B. Chen. Security would be looking for a escaped inmate in a fancy green dancing dress and pink high heels with a bruised face whose hair was loose. Not a staff member whose only touch of originality was that her shoes were pink.

As I passed the knot of security around Jay, they were asking him, "Where did your girlfriend go?"

Jay batted his eyes and smiled at them. "Did you, uh, try the ladies' room?"

No one paid any attention to me as I scooped his unattended shoes off the floor along the way.


	3. Tick Tock

No matter how good the hardware may be, any security system is only as good as the goofballs they've got running it. Let's face it, the best and brightest don't go for careers as security guards in mental institutions. I found out a long time ago that the easiest way to get me and my knives past a 'secure' doorway was to send a guy with a gun through first. Then they're so busy dealing with him that I can walk on through unchallenged. The same principle was at work here: they noticed Gracie was gone, leaving her handcuffs neatly behind, still locked, but nobody noticed my nice plaid socks, now on display for the whole asylum to see because my shoes were elsewhere.

As an example of why the security was for shit around this Arkham, there was the guard, Frank Boles. I don't like drinkers; I've fired a few, in my time, when one turned up in my crew. Usually with gasoline or a gun. Not only was Boles a drunk, he openly wore a hip flask on his belt. When somebody like that doesn't get canned, it means the job is so crappy they can't get anybody else. Then the guys who otherwise might be decent see him and figure if he can get away with it, they don't have to do any better, and the whole force goes to hell. There are always a few exceptions, a few who do a good job anyway, but integrity like that is rare.

Meanwhile, Grace had come and gone right past this bunch of yahoos as smooth as lemon buttercream, and nobody gave her a second glance. I wiggled my toes; the pimpled vinyl flooring was chilly but not as chilly as if we were standing on the ground floor--that meant there were levels below this one. I filed that away for future reference, and waited for them to get tired of shouting questions at me and at each other and at people on the guard radio.

The only guard I noted who had both brains and balls was a big guy named Cash (imagine Lawrence Fishburn with a neat goatee in the role) who seemed to be senior. He was missing a hand, and wore one of those pincher-hook prosthetics. "Keep your weapons trained on Joker the whole time. You outta be watching him so close you can count his blinks!" he said, when things looked to be getting lax in all the excitement.

Although it held things up, Gracie's disappearing act got me moved to the head of the line, ahead even of Bozo, who was wheeled aside so they could concentrate on grilling me. Bozo (AKA The Joker of this world) was not really pleased about that, but not so unhappy that he couldn't make remarks like, "All of this new security, and you can't keep tabs on one not-so-little girl? Then don't blame me when I just WALTZ RIGHT THROUGH IT! Is_ anyone_ listening to me?"

Back to the security. I had to say I didn't think much of their hardware either. Why not? For one thing, they relied too much on electricity, like for instance, the human bug zappers which they had instead of doors in some areas. When the only thing between a deranged murderer, like me, and you or someone like you, is a forcefield, what happens when the power goes out? Let's not go deluding ourselves here. The power can always go out. One way or another. What about battery backups? They can fail. Generators? They fail too—especially when the fuel runs out.

Yeah, I know the one about 'stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage'—but they're a hell of a lot better than nothing at all, and nothing is what you've got when something shorts out your bug-zapper. That was the worst example, but I also noticed a few ventilation grills in the walls which were big enough for a guy my size to crawl through, and the grills themselves were fastened by bolts and nuts. The nuts were on the outside, and I didn't see any welds, so anybody with a wrench—or even a thumb and forefinger—could get them loose in a hurry. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

In my experience, failsafes are usually more 'fail' than 'safe', and _nothing_, nothing is foolproof. Especially when I'm the fool.

After a while they got tired of getting no answers out of me. Guard Cash ordered, "Get them out of here!"

"I'll deal with you later, Cash," Bozo threw back in passing, "Don't think I've forgotten--Speaking of forgetting, is that a crocodile I hear? Tick tock, tick tock, Captain Hook!" Cash fell in behind the other guards, keeping an eye on them and us. The drunk guard, Boles, led the parade, followed by the two who were wheeling Bozo, then two more guards who had their weapons aimed at him, then me, then _my_ guard, who held his gun at portarms (I wasn't considered as great a threat, that was why), and finally, as I mentioned before, Cash.

We went through a door that had both electronic locks and a bug zapper, passing another knot of guards behind whom cringed a dark haired woman in a doctor's lab coat. Spotting her, Bozo sang out, "Ah, there's Doc Young! Pencil me in for tomorrow at four. We've got a lot of catching up to do." The last part he said with menace.

"Oh...Joker," she said, weakly. I glanced at her: another squealer. It was written all over her.

We were now in the prisoner transfer area, a long hallway divided down the long way by iron bars. As we entered, a flat screen mounted overhead lit up, and a prerecorded video of the Warden started up. "Greetings, new patient! I'm Warden Sharp. Welcome to Arkham Asylum..."

Whatever else he had to say was drowned out by Bozo. "My favorite show! 'I'm Warden Idiot. You'll never escape'." he blustered in imitation of the pudgy little head jailor.

He in turn was interrupted by a group of prisoners going the other way on the other side of the bars. "Jo-ker! Jo-ker! Jo-ker!" they chanted. I nearly waved before I remembered they couldn't be cheering for me. "Did ya hear about what happened at Blackgate, boss?" Blackgate was the other big prison in Gotham. Never been there myself; they tell me it isn't nice.

"Shut up and keep moving," said one of their guards.

"Oh, yes! How shocking." Bozo crooned. "The state of the old wiring in some of these federal facilities is so hazardous. Why, some of my poor boys could have been hurt in that terrible fire." I had the feeling I knew who had arranged that fire. It's what I would have done.

Just before we got to another set of doors, a medic halted us. "Hold it right there. Just got to check your prisoner--_prisoners_," he corrected himself.

"Do you need to take my temperature, Doc?" Bozo smarmed. "I'd be _happy_ to drop my pants."

The doctor ignored him (His scrubs were just like the ones Gracie thought up. My sassy girl is _good_.) while giving him the once over. "Looks like he's got a few contusions, a couple of hours old, and--."

"BOO!" Bozo shouted. Everyone but me jumped, the safety catches clicking off their weapons. He laughed. "Feeling a little bit nervous, are we?"

"Speak for yourself," I retorted. He tried to stare me down, but failed.

The medic checked me over next. His brow knitted when he inspected my face, but he confined his questioning to, "Is any of this blood yours?"

"No," I replied.

"Not yet, anyhow." insinuated Bozo.

"They're all yours," the doctor said.

"All right, move it along," ordered the drunk, and we passed on by into the elevator lobby, which put new meaning into the word 'utilitarian', being concrete and steel, dimly lit, and crowded with more heavily armed guards. There was no 'up' from where we were standing; we were on the top floor. The echoes and air currents told me the shafts, and therefore the building, went down deep.

'Ten levels down,' Gracie said, mentally. I could see her hanging around the outside of the group, looking the way she did when I was the only one who could see her. Don't ask me to explain how I knew. I just did.

_That's a long way_. I thought back.

'Just wait till you see it. If the original architect had a gargoyle fetish, the guy who did the underground addition, which screams late seventies to me, must have been even weirder. It looks like the inside of the Death Star--after it had been used as a crackhouse for a few years.'

_I can't wait. Why are we standing around?_

The shrieking and groaning of one of the two elevators told me even before an emotionless female voice said, "Security alert red alpha. Category nine patient is in transit. Safety catches disengaged. Shoot to kill permissions granted."

_Sounds serious. They didn't even go that far for Bozo_.

'Just wait till you see.' Gracie told me.

"You heard the lady," ordered an older guard, gravelly voiced. "We got another psycho on the way."

The huge freight elevator labored to a halt. Something shiny in it shifted as the sliding grill opened. Then, like a football player getting out of a little clown car, a hand emerged, a forearm, another hand, a head. The...occupant got out. And out. And out. And out some more, until a massive scaly...thing in purplish pants, and a heavy collar filled with green liquid like anti-freeze, laden with chains you'd use to moor a battleship, was standing there. It was at least eleven feet tall. Did I mention it had glowing yellow eyes? And lots of long pointy teeth? And scales?

"Can't you just smell the excitement?" Bozo asked. "No? Then maybe it was one of the guards. Croc, old boy! Is that you?"

"What is that?" I asked the nearest guard.

"Where've you been living?" he scoffed. "That's _Killer Croc_."

No, it wasn't. Not where I came from. I knew a guy who called himself 'Killah Croc'. Big mean son-of-a-bitch with bad teeth thanks to wearing a jeweled grill too long, nasty skin condition, always hungry, always chowing down on meat. His real name was Waylon Jones. I'd even hired him now and then. But he was identifiably a human being. Not the star of Jurassic Park Four: From the Jungle to the 'Hood.

'Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more. This Arkham is a very interesting place_.'_

_I gotta agree with you there, Gracie gal_.

This Killer Crock shifted, and the floor trembled. How much did he/it weigh? It/he lifted his head, and it sniffed the air. "You're there, Cash," he gritted. "I can smell you. " Poor eyesight? That would make sense. "It makes me hungry. Once I get a bite, I can't wait to finish the meal. AAAaaahhh!" That last was a cry of pain, as a guard with a remote control pressed something, and the liquid filled collar sparked violently.

"Get that animal out of here," Cash barked. He hid it well, but there was an edge of fear buried in his voice. I can always tell.

Speaking of which..._Gracie, you can tell these things. Did Croc eat that guy's hand_?

'I...I'm not sure. He might not have actually eaten it, but he definitely bit it off.'

Aided by more shocks from the collar, Croc shuffled off somewhere into the rest of the building. Once he was gone, Bozo said, brightly, "That reminds me. I really need to get me some new shoes."


	4. Don't Play Nice

_Speaking of shoes, Gracie-gal, where did you stash mine?_

'I found the fire stairs and I hid them on one of the landings. I'll go back for them once I know where you're going to be. Also, while we're on the topic of shoes, none of the Blackgate prisoners are wearing them. What's up with that? The floors are filthy, too.'

_Probably hospital prodecure. It's a lot harder to stomp some guy's spleen and liver into tomato paste when you don't have shoes on_.

"Okay, load'em into the elevator." the gravelly voiced guard ordered, and we got in, shedding three of the guards, one of whom was Cash. That left us with Boles, one person to wheel Bozo, another to keep a weapon pointed at him, my guard, and of course Bozo, Gracie and myself, even if Gracie wasn't visible to anyone else. The grate closed, and still more flat screens on the opposite sides of the elevator lit up with yet another message from the warden, who I was getting awfully tired of already. This time he was going on about the temporary Blackgate inmates and how everyone should avoid contact with them.

'He has pictures of himself on practically every wall.' Gracie informed me. '_Big_ ones. Napoleon complex. Classic overcompensation.'

"Hey," Bozo said, as if it had only just occured to him, "isn't it funny how a fire at Blackgate just happened to result in hundreds of my men being moved here?"

"I thought I told you to shut it, clown," Boles snarled.

"You ought to watch that big fat mouth of yours, Frankie. It'll get you into trouble one of these days," Bozo replied, silkily.

"You mean funny-strange or hah-hah funny--the fire and the move and everything?" I asked. "Funny str-ran-ge, no. I don't think it's funny _strange_. I can't think of anything less strange, under the, uh, circumstances..."

Right then the power cut out. The elevator stopped, the lights went dead, the flatscreens went silent and dark. The guards started to panic. "Oh, my god, oh, my god, what's he doing?" "Get a light on him, get a flashlight on him quick!"

I stayed calm and silent. I knew that whatever he had planned to happen, was happening. In a moment the power would go back on, and it would seem as if it were no more than a fluctuation, but Bozo would now be in control of everything--except us.

While the guards kept on having hysterics, getting out their flashlights, dropping them and all, Gracie said to me, 'Hospitals are actually one of the classic contemporary Asian horror settings.'

_Is that a fact, now?_

'Sure is. All the pain, all the suffering, all the dying--hospitals are packed with ghosts.'

_Have fun_.

One of the guards finally found his flashlight and trained it on Bozo--except that hanging upside down just behind him was a Dead Wet Girl. Gracie, of course, greenish-skinned, looking about a week dead and with her hair hanging down in long slimy ropes and her arms swinging limply from their sockets. "AAAAAAsssssshit! What the hell is that thing?" they cried, approximately.

Bozo couldn't see what was going on. "What are you talking about? What's there?" he snapped, trying to rutch around and see for himself, but then the light came back on and of course nobody was there. The elevator resumed its descent, the videos came back to life, and everything seemed normal once more. I knew better.

"Something dead," said Boles, shifting his gun to under his arm and grabbing his flask. Was he going to--? Yes, he he took a big swig and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

"I don't know what it was and I don't want to see it again," said another guard.

"I didn't see anything un-u-sual," I offered. After all, there was nothing _unusual_ about seeing my wife.

"Hmmm," Bozo thought, "could it be that Dr. Crane is starting the festivities early? I must remember to tell him what I think about his jumping the gun. As it were."

"So Scarecrow's here too?" I asked.

"Shut it," Boles put in, but Bozo was not to be stopped.

"Only technically. He's on the premises, but somehow they just can't seem to keep him in his cell. All they get are brief glimpses of him on camera when he raids the kitchens. Heaven only knows what he's getting up to...."

The elevator clanged to a halt. "Level Nine, Security status Red Alpha," chimed the announcement system.

"Our guest has arrived," said a waiting guard with satisfaction as the grill slid aside. Boles led the way into the admissions lobby, past half a dozen guards who glared at Bozo, wanting him to give them an excuse for shooting.

One lashed out, "You killed three of my friends the last time you broke out of here, you freak!"

"Only three?" Bozo retorted, sounding as queeney as the whole cast of La Cage Aux Folles, "What say I go for a hundred next time?" That was not a joke, and no one listening should have thought so.

Then things got complicated for a little while as this world's version of Commissioner Gordon got involved with checking Bozo in, and I got shunted off into a holding cell, where I began to see what Gracie meant by the lower levels looking like the Death Star converted into a crack house. First of all, old patient files littered the floor like leaves on an autumn lawn, rubber stamped 'Insane' in red ink. That had to be illegal--patient confidentiality, you know--and then there was the cell, one of four in the holding area. All of them had those bug zappers instead of doors.

The one I was shown into had ceramic tiles on the wall, but a good third of them were cracked and broken, and there were shards of tile lying around on the floor. Okay, so broken ceramics aren't nearly as sharp as broken glass, but they'll still put an eye out. This wasn't new damage, either. Broken tiles, which nobody bothered to have swept up, decorated with green graffiti, mainly question marks, a single cot with a filthy brown blanket, heavy leather straps with metal buckles, to restrain whoever needed it, a seatless toilet, more old patient files--and a couple of busted up lockers. Yes. Busted up lockers. In a holding cell. One of the doors was already off the hinges completely and leaning against the wall.

This went beyond dumb on the asylum's part. It headed into death wish territory and flirted with suicidal ideation. These people were _asking_ for it. And loudly too. _So _many things in there that could deliver some serious agony, not to mention mutilation.

My cell also already had an occupant, obviously a Blackgate transfer, because although the light of rationality did not burn in his eyes, he was muscled like Hercules (most long term to lifers are. The prison system takes healthy 18 to 24 year old men, puts them in a place where they have nothing to do and simultaneously relieves them of the burden of earning a living, and they then spend eight hours a day, every day, working out in the prison gym.) He was white, if it matters, and wore only a pair of dirty canvas pants with leather reinforcements here and there and patches at the knees, where there were rings to thread manacle chains through.

His shaved head had these little yellow cones running front to back like a mohawk, and I wondered what they were as I stepped up to the toilet and took a piss. That was not so much out of necessity as to send the message, if my scars weren't enough, that I was at least as much of a hardcase as he was. Solid citizens can't relax enough to relieve themselves under those circumstances. Were those cones on his head his hair, stiffened and shaped? Were they some kind of implant? A weird bone growth, maybe?

I shook it off and tucked it away, then looked around. Ah. No sink, no hand cleanser. Call me crazy, but I'm fussy about things like that. I flushed away my by-product. Well, if the sink would have had the same water as was refilling the toilet, I was better off not washing. My dick was cleaner than that murky brew. The other three cells were in more or less the same shape as mine, and each had two Blackgaters in them, also muscled like Hercules and wearing more or less the same thing as my cellmate, but varying in skin color and hair. Just a bunch of expendables, that's all.

Speaking of someone who was anything but expendable, not to mention impossible, where was Gracie with my shoes? She had left to go get them after I was shown into my current palatial accommodations. How long would it take--ah. There she was. The holding cell area was separated from the lobby on one side and whatever else was on this level on the other by still more bug zappers, industrial strength this time. Grace was behind an observation window in one of the small offices overlooking the area on the lobby side--with Commissioner Gordon, no less. She was pretending to do things in the background while he talked to a doctor. So far her little masquerade was holding, then.

The doctor left the office, and shortly after that, the bug zapper on that side fizzled off. Bozo, now walking, his hands cuffed in front of him, came down the short ramp to the holding cells, escorted by a single guard without any weapon other than a shockstick/nightstick kind of thing, and by the doctor. The zapper went back on right after they came in.

"I've got to say, it's good to be back!", Bozo roared with laughter. He pretended to stumble, going down on one knee and the guard bent over to pull him up. Then Bozo whipped his head back, smacking the guard in the face while simultaneously elbowing him in the gut. The guy doubled over, and in a flash, Bozo had his arms around his neck from behind and was strangling him with the handcuff chain.

While the doctor pried at Bozo's hands ineffectively, he chortled, "Hurry up, Doc! I think we're losing him!"

Meanwhile, up in the offices overlooking this little comedy, the guards were going berserk, stabbing away at buttons, gesturing and shouting at each other. It seemed their security system wasn't obeying them any more--surprise, surprise! Just as I predicted, Bozo and his people were in control now. A loud thump--Gracie had a metal stool in both hands and was bashing away at the window. Cracks appeared but it was that super tough glass and wouldn't give up the fight that easily. She tried again--more cracks.,

Bozo let the dead guard drop, seized the doctor's head in both hands and twisted. I heard his neck break. Dropping the doctor, he went back to frisk the guard. "The choke's on you." he punned, to the fresh corpse. A moment later, he had his hands free, straightened up and did a little ass-shaking victory dance while he sang out, "Hee-hee, Hah-hah-hah! Honey, I'm home!"

A screechy female voice came over the loudspeaker system. "But Puddin', where's the Bat?"

"There's been a slight change of plans, Kiddo. I'll tell you all about it--once I get in." he hinted sternly.

"Sorry, sweetie. I was just confused, that's all." The bug zappers on the asylum side fizzled off, and he leaped through them.

"Let's get this party started, shall we? With a _bang_!" He flung his hands in the air, and tore off down the hall way.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen," his voice came out over the speaker system, "after Batman went and stood me up, I was so frustrated that I was just going to flood the asylum with poison gas and then watch cartoons. But you know how I love a captive audience, and we have a couple of other contestants on hand for our little game show, so why don't we give them a big round of applause? There's Gracie, who's an Asian girl in a fancy green dress who doesn't know how to use a hairbrush, current whereabouts unknown, and her lucky husband, uh---."

"Call me Jay," I suggested.

"--Jay, who's currently in the holding cells. You'll know him by the beautiful Chelsea grin he wears--that is, a smile cut right into his face--and his deplorable taste in suits. Gracie and Jay, to win the game, all you have to do is--_survive till dawn_. Have fun now, kiddies--and don't play nice."

My cellmate was looking at me with simian eyes, and now he grunted, smacking one fist into the palm of his other hand. Then the bug zapper on our door and the door of the cell directly across from us fizzled off, releasing both us and two others.

"Round one!" cried Bozo gleefully. "Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding."


	5. Creative Uses For Locker Doors

"_You're_ gonna bleed," predicted my cellmate, and drew back his arm.

A locker door might not be as humorous a prop as a ladder, but I'm adaptable. I snatched up the loose door and swung it around to meet my cellmate's fist. Instead of knocking me square into next week, he connected with metal. Klang-crunch, the door had a dent and he had a fistful of pain. I laughed, flipped the door up and sliced his head, tearing loose a flap of scalp and a couple of his pointy little cones. Scalp wounds always bleed with enthusiasm, but I didn't waste time to appreciate the details.

Three quick rams to the nose and mouth, and he flew backward, along with a few of his teeth. I usually don't begin with the head, but with so many other new playmates, I didn't want to spend too much time on just one. The others might feel neglected or unwanted and I don't like to hurt people's feelings. Just the rest of them.

"Y' see, Bozo," I said, spring-boarding off my cellmate's face as I leapt out of the cell to meet my other new friends, "I have some, uh, is-sues about your definition of winning. _You_ seem to think that we're just part of the herd." I slammed the edge of the door into the Adam's apple of the nearest expendable, then smashed his toes hard. "And. We're. Not."

Where was the other goon? Ah, he was trying to be smart. He went back to get his own locker door, but he then tried to get out of the cell the wrong way, widthwise, not lengthwise, and knocked the wind out of himself. "_I_ say that—," Pausing a moment to trip up the guy with the smashed toes, I sent him right into one of the bug zappers.

He stuck to it for a moment, twitching and babbling involuntarily before he sagged, unconscious, to the ground. I had to laugh. "That was funny. Those, uh, things are good for something after all. I say the game isn't lost or won until one or the other of us, that is, you—" The goon with his own locker door figured out how to get through the door and charged at me. I sidestepped and smacked him on the ass with my door as he went by. "Olé!" I laughed again, this time at the look on his face. "Until either you or I throw down."

"What _are _you talking about?" he asked, irritated.

"The _name._ The_ title_. There can only be _one_ Joker. That's, uh, _that's_ what this is really about. Otherwise, you'd have waited for Bats to show." The guy with the door turned around for another pass, but I sidestepped again, swung and knocked him into another bug zapper. "Damn, but that's _good_, uh, comedy. When one of us says to the other, 'You are the J-word.', _then_ it's over."

He guffawed. "Do you really think you can get me—_me!—_to give up the title?"

"Yes. I think I can. I think I, uh, _will_." No more playmates here—not conscious or living, anyway. Where was Gracie? Still in the observation office, where Commissioner Gordon was trying to get the stool away from her. It was too much to expect her to lay his head open with it instead, she still had scruples about things like that.

Bozo was speaking again. "Well, who am I to say you can't make it harder for yourself?" He giggled. "To the throw down it is, then!—I suppose that means I'll have to leave your tongue intact so you can say the words. I'll enjoy making you grovel when you say it... Back to the show! Fresh from Blackgate Correctional Facility, with a combined sentence of seven hundred fifty-two years—It's Round Two! Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding!"

A crash behind me told me that Grace had won the fight for the stool and with the glass. As the other set of bug zappers fizzled out, releasing the other four expendables, first one of my shoes and then the other flew past my ear. "Watch it, Sassy girl! Are you going to help or are you just going to stand around and look beautiful?" I said, using the door as a shield as they attacked all at once. I finally had my shoes, but somehow I doubted my new friends would let me call a time-out so I could put them on.

"I thought I would watch as they hand your ass to you in a swing and laugh and laugh and _laugh_," she retorted. "Far be it for me to tell you what to do, but have you noticed that black box on the wall over there? The one with the emergency light on it? The one marked—Now I _know_ you can read, even if _they_ can't."

Black box. On the wall. Oh. The one marked 'Guns'. And it didn't have a nice strong practical padlock on it. It looked like it could be pried open, in fact. (Institutional suicidal tendencies again.) However, it seemed that some of these goons could read, as long as it was words of one syllable, and one of them ran over there and was already heaving on the handle. "Thanks for, uh, calling their attention to it!" The emergency light was not there just for show. It was flashing and a siren was going off, but since alarms now seemed to be going off everywhere.

I fought my way over to the box, slashing, slamming and jabbing with my locker door, just as the goon got it open. "More firepower over here!" he whooped, before he first realized there was only one gun, (but a nice semiautomatic) and secondly realized a locker door to the face.

Guns are not my weapon of choice, but somehow I knew this night would offer lots of unique and rare opportunities for violence of all kinds, and these new friends were boring me already. So I finished them off quickly in order to get to the good parts. Just like swallowing carrot coins without chewing so dessert would come faster.

Then I put my shoes on.

"Maybe you're not all hot air after all," Bozo said, sounding petulant. "Those were just the warm-up. I've got much bigger surprises in store for you. Aaah, this is simply too, too stultifying. Why don't you just come find me?" The bug zappers on the asylum side fizzled out.

More glass crashed, and Gracie (still tangible and still dressed as Arkham staff) leaped down from the broken window to join me, over the protests of Gordon.

"Shall we?" she asked, quirking an eyebrow at me.

"After you," I waved a hand.

* * *

A/N: A short one. Next chapter: Victor Zsasz and Harley Quinn.


	6. Victor Zsasz, Zombie Hunter!

The first evidence of Other Joker was a trio of chattering wind-up plastic teeth skittering around teetering stacks of old files in the office on that side of the force fields. Further down the hall (which I swear truly did look like some 70's idea of the inside of a spaceship) was another set. "He's left us a trail of bread crumbs to follow." I shouted over evergency klaxons and not-too-distant gunfire.

"Looks like." Jay replied. We tore off in the direction of the next set, down a hall where safety gates slid down protectively over office doors as we passed. Here they had actual metal bars, not just energy fields. The priorities around here were _so _screwed up. We passed the dead body of a guard slumped against the wall, turned a corner, and threaded our way down another corridor, around askew desks and endless stacks of old patient files. Not to mention huge pictures of Warden Sharp every ten feet or so. Panicked rats dashed across our path from time to time. I thought we might have gone the wrong way, but now and then, confirmation of our being on the right track, was another set of teeth.

"Plastic teeth," Jay said, sounding disgusted, "I, uh, should have expected it. Y'see, the kind of mind that likes plastic teeth is the kind that goes for, uh, cream pies in the face, and whoopie cushions. _Kitch_." He said it like it was a dirty word.

"Except that in his case it'd probably be poisoned cream and explosive gas in the cushions. Or joy buzzers that have lethal voltage." I said. "You know, if you ever started doing stuff like that, I would lose all respect for you."

"You have _respect_ for me? Since when? Oh, by the way, Gracie-gal, it's _sling_, not swing."

"Come again?" I asked without thinking.

"—Okay, if you really want it now. Up against the wall? Or should we hit one of those cots—."

"Hentai!" I snapped at him. "Filthy-minded, nigh insatiable—." I wasn't really offended. This was just how we interacted. You, oh non-existent reader, can be happy your way with your significant other, and I'll be happy mine.

"Yeah, that's you, but I put up with it. The saying is 'ass in a sling', not 'ass in a swing'."

We didn't really need to talk aloud, but when I was tangible, we generally did. Force of habit, I suppose.

Jay tripped over another body, rolled with the fall, sat up and suddenly guffawed, pointing. "Eve-ry time I think I've seen the, uh, worse around here, it gets lower. The guards' vests aren't even bullet-proof! Why did Bozo even bother knocking this place over? Shooting puppies in a barrel, because that's just what this is, is—um, I don't know, _unsporting_. Too easy to be worth doing."

"Even if it's to get Batman?"

"There they are! Get'em!" roared a henchman, charging around a fork in the corridor ahead. He had a friend with him.

Jay shot them both without bothering to get to his feet. "Even if it's to get Batman. Out of ammo..." He threw the gun aside. "Where's the next gun box? You check that side, I'll check this one." He went down one of the forking corridors and I went down the other.

"Hey? Who is that? Miss, over here!" A miraculously unharmed guard down at the end of the hallway waved his arms at me. "The Joker's loose. It's not safe."

"I know," I said, putting on a Chinese accent. "Did he come this way?"

"Yeah. Look, you oughtta find somewhere to hide—."

His radio squawked, and someone said, "We need back up in Pacification. Zsasz is loose. I repeat, we need back up. Zsasz is free and—Oh, God!"

"Zsasz?" I asked. Another parallel with our world. Zsasz was an inmate of our Arkham too.

"Victor Zsasz. You _really_ need to get somewhere safe! He killed twenty girls over just three months, and that's only the tip of the iceberg—hey, where are you going?"

I wasn't sure myself. There are certain killers whose victims' anger clings to them like smoke to fire, certain special victims, those bound to them by familial ties, and when I am near such a killer I am _compelled_ to—well, there's more than one reason I'm called The Grudge. At least since meeting Death recently I've come to understand what happens and keep hold of myself when the compulsion comes. Which family member or members had Zsasz killed? Was he protected by the laws of Story as Jay and Batman were? I would soon find out.

* * *

It was too bad that Batman wasn't coming—or at least wasn't there yet. Zsasz's skin crawled, needing, wanting, craving the mark he would carve into himself once he killed the Bat. In the meantime, he nicked his bicep to commemorate the zombie guard piggy-wiggy he had just freed from his miserable pointless life, and gazed dreamily at the blade. "I _need_ more marks." he said aloud. "My skin doesn't feel like mine yet."

Long ago, he had permanantly removed all the hair on his body, the better to free up skin surface for more marks. He cut them in the traditional way, groupings of five with the fifth mark slashed diagonally over the first four. One mark per victim. He was approaching a tally of a hundred and fifty, and consequently was starting to run out of body space. If only he had made them smaller to begin with... Four of the longest stood out in sharp relief on his forehead, lacking the cross mark. That one, that diagonal, he was saving for the Bat, so naked or clothed he could gaze at it and _remember_.

Last year, he'd had a crushing blow; one of his victims had the audacity to live, thanks to his employer's infinitely deep pockets, and after Zsasz had already made the mark for him, too! One day he would revisit Alfred Pennyworth, finish the job—and then take Bruce Wayne for good measure. After he killed Batman first, of course.

For now, he was willing to play catch up with whatever Asylum personnel he could find. By mere chance he had found an office whose safety bars had stuck halfway, and so he had dragged the pig in there to have some fun with him. But he didn't yet know how to pose this victim. (Posing the subject after death was a work of art in itself.) Peering under the safety barrier, he caught sight of a lithe figure sprinting down the hallway. A woman, young, in Arkham staff scrubs and bright pink nurse's shoes, a rope of dark hair swishing against her back. Perfect. She would be worthy of his Dark Gift.

"Nurse--oh, nurse, there's a man here who's hurt. He needs your help." Zsasz called out.

She stopped, turned, and hurried over to him. That was one of the many wonderful things about women. They were programmed to respond to the words 'need help', and even when they didn't want to, when their instincts told them not to, they _had_ to.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"In here." She ducked under the bars--and oh, she was lovely. Golden beige skin, _black_ black hair, exotically shaped eyes. She _was_ worthy. "He's here." Zasaz could hardly keep from laughing.

"This man is dead!" she said, checking the piggy-wiggy's vitals.

"Everyone is," Zsasz said, snaking an arm around her neck from behind and bringing his knife up so she could see it. "Nothing matters. No one matters. All you zombies, lurching around your miserable, meaningless lives--I'm doing you a favor, really. Giving you a gift, setting you free--."

"Is that so?" she asked, and her voice was wrong. She sounded cool, detached, even a little amused. "I prefer the 28 Days Later style of zombie myself--all hyped up and rabid. I could never see why people were so afraid of the slow, clumsy ones."

"What?" he asked.

"You killed your parents." she stated, and now this conversation was going places Zsasz truly did not care for. "For your inheritance. Which you then wasted."

"It was an accident--a boating accident! It happened while we were sailing--."

"But we know better." He would have killed her slowly, he had wanted to kill her slowly, but he was so disconcerted that he slashed fast and hard across her throat--.

Except she wasn't there, and he had sliced deeply into his own arm--and his neck. It _hurt_. The man who believed that nothing mattered suddenly realized that something _did_ matter, terribly. His blood sprang forth as though it were eager to get away from him, but it didn't drip or spray, it billowed out as if they were underwater. It was beautiful, spreading out in voluptuous crimson clouds, but he hurt so badly and it was pouring out so fast, and then there she was again, only she was different now. Her hair was loose, waving in the water like ink in a seer's bowl, and her white dress too, like fancy goldfish fins. Her feet in their pink shoes did not touch the floor; she floated between floor and ceiling, greenish in the light.

"I--I need help," he stammered, as the blood spread. Sharks, it would attract sharks, that was why he had been careful not to spill so much as a drop of his parent's blood, because it would be stupid for him to die when he was on the verge of actually living for once. "I'm bleeding and they'll, they'll _eat_ me."

"Why don't you ask that guard for help?," she inquired, and now he saw her eyes were bleeding too. Danger, so much danger--. "I'm sure he had first aid training. Or Doctor Sarah Cassidy, your psychiatrist here, who you stalked and killed. Or your mother and father."

"They're dead! Help me, please!" He had never been cut seriously before, and, and it wasn't as much fun as the superficial marks he made on himself. It wasn't fun at all.

"But I'm dead too. What can I do?" She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Zombies aren't known for their medical skills and helpfulness. Zombies..." she writhed forward toward him, took his face in her hands. For a moment it seemed as though she would kiss him, but instead she brushed her thumbs over his eyes. "You want zombies, I'll give you zombies. Zombies...and sharks."

* * *

I didn't find another gun cabinet, maybe because this area was all offices, so I retraced my steps and went down the other corridor. "Gracie? Come out, come out wherever you are!"

"In here!" She stuck her head out of the wall ahead, and when I got there I found it a stuck security gate and an office with one dead guard, one bleeding but living guy in what looked like serious bondage gear--his pants weren't buckled on him but locked in place--and Grace. There was a lot of blood around. She was watching as the guy in the kinky outfit gibbered and thrashed on the floor. "He killed his parents," she said by way of explanation.

"Okay. This isn't like you, though. Don't you usually, uh, bring on hideous diseases leading to horrible deaths?"

"Yes, but I'm not allowed to actually kill this one, for the same reason that Scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul are protected. That doesn't mean I can't mess with him, though."

"Did you find any guns?" I asked her.

"No, but he has a couple of knives."

"Works for me..." I found the blades, wiped them off, and pocketed them. "Time to get back to chasing teeth."

We went back out in the hall and were hunting for more teeth when the airlock doors at either end of the hall made a sound that suggested they had just locked up tight. A bank of flat screen monitors came alive with static. "Not more announcements from the warden," I said, disgustedly. "Remind me to kill him later."

But it wasn't Sharpie. Instead the screechy female voice asked, "Is this thing on?" and we were treated to a picture of jiggling cleavage at extreme close up. "Oh. Hiya! Harlequin here. That's two words, Harley Quinn. I'm Mistah J's girlfriend."

The cleavage moved backward so we could see who it belonged to. She was blond and blue eyed, with her hair in two pigtails and a nurse's hat in between, her face was painted white with two perfect circles of rouge on her cheeks, and she had a little black mask around her eyes. Going south from there, she had on a very scanty Naughty Nurse outfit over a red and blue PVC corset that shoved her tits up almost to her chin, a dog collar buckled around her neck, long gloves in still more red and blue PVC, studded black leather wristlets, and black fishnets under one red and one blue thigh high PVC boot. Her navel was out for the whole world to see, as were her panty straps.

Gracie summed it up. "Oh, look! It's a Rocky Horror Barbie! And it talks!"

I snickered, but Bondage Barbie started as if slapped. "I didn't wear it to impress you! What do _you _think?" She wriggled and posed for me, smiling and batting her eyes.

I said what I thought. "I. uh, have simple tastes, really. I don't mind cheap--but I draw the line at sleazy. And _you're_ sleazy."

TBC....

* * *

A/N: Batwiki says that Victor Zsasz's wealthy parents died in a boating accident when he was twenty-five and he then lost his entire fortune gambling. It seemed to me that given his later career, it was not too much of a stretch that they might have been his first victims. Some people love Harley, some loathe her. I'm going with Harley as she seems in the game. As they say, clothes may make the man, but you can tell a lady just by looking.

Thanks for the reviews! They keep me writing!


	7. Pretty Poison

"Personally, I don't go for the type of girls who charge by the hour, or even just look like they do," I explained.

"I _do not_ look like a hooker!" fumed Harley Quinn. "Do not do not do not! OOOOoooooh!" It was like watching a four year old have a temper tantrum. "You better watch what you say about me, 'cuz Mistah Jay won't like it."

"First of all, does either of us give the impression that we care what 'Mistah Jay' likes?, and second, from what I've seen of him so far, he'd probably laugh too." Gracie pointed out.

"I'm gonna enjoy tonight," Harley said, her mouth doing something hard and mean. "You made me lose my place. Hold on one second." For the first time, I noticed that she was holding the Warden's cane and had his ID clipped to her Naughty Nurse blouse. Tottering off screen on her silly vinyl boots, she disappeared, and a moment later, an office chair spun into sight with Warden Sharp in it, bound and gagged with duct tape. The gag had a red lipstick smile crayoned on it.

"Good start," I admitted, "At least he's quiet."

"Yeah," Harley screeched, reappearing. "I'm now subbing for the old man. He actually thinks he runs this place! Talk about _crazy_!" Putting one knee on an arm rest, she leaned up against him, caressing his bald head and cradling it to her breasts. "Old Sharpie's never been happier, see?" She slapped his face and stepped in front of him, leaning on the cane and flaunting her tits for the camera again. Which meant she was also shoving her ass in Sharp's face. I wondered how he enjoyed that.

"Now the inmates are running the asylum. Well, technically, it's the Joker's goons shipped in from Blackgate, but you get the picture. We've got control of everything—all the gates, all the locks, all the codes—and that means you two aren't going anywhere until me and Mistah J. are ready for you. Buh-bye!" She stepped back, hefted the cane in one hand, swung it, and smashed the camera.

"Well, she certainly told us, didn't she?" Gracie drawled sardonically. "You know, I cannot for the life--or afterlife, either--of me imagine the two of them actually having sex. I'm not talking about that being an image too horrible for the mind to comprehend, but more like trying to imagine a begonia plant and a piece of Gruyere cheese getting it on. I just don't see how it could work."

"Hold that, uh, thought," I said. "What I want to know is, what are you, uh, gonna come up with to top her outfit? Something with more class, but something that's uniquely you."

"Why do you think I would bother?" she asked.

"Hey, it's me, remember? I know my sassy girl, and I know her down to her Shoes. Now, Rocky Horror Barbie may think she has us trapped in here, but she, uh, didn't strike me as being the brightest diamond in the vault. Up there in that wall is one of those vents. I'm gonna boost you up there so you can get the cover off. Because of the two of us, you're the one who can't get stuck or sliced up by fans or mashed flat by a trash compactor, plus you have your nifty floating flaming marshmallow ghost lights to show you where you're going, you're gonna be the one to scout out where it goes while I have a look around here for another way out. Okay?"

"All right." She stood on my shoulders and unscrewed the grating, then slithered up into the hole. "I don't need my lights. There's lighting built in, for some reason."

"Does it seem sturdy enough to hold my weight?" I asked.

"Sure. I'll holler when I get somewhere."

* * *

I heard shouting and gunfire as I moved through the ducts, both close by and distant. I was the right choice for doing this sort of exploring, because there were dead ends (not to mention dead rats) and air circulation fans which blocked parts of it. But it was also boring.

'Find any other way out?' I asked Jay.

_Not yet. Just another duct at floor level that led nowhere. I found somebody's stash of M&Ms, though_.

'And I found three dead rats.'

_Classy joint, this Arkham. I'll save you some of the M&Ms_.

'Thanks. So what are you doing?' I was concentrating on not getting lost, so I wasn't paying that much close attention to his thoughts. However, I had the definite sense he was up to something.

_Well, I found this first aid kit and this little sewing kit, and I thought I would put the two together and try something new_.

'Such as?'

_Doing good. You know, there's something to be said for it, it kind of gives you this warm glow..._

'What precise form is this 'doing good' taking?' To say that 'doing good' was unlike Jay was like calling ice hot and rain dry, or looking for a secular version of the Bible.

_Ministering to the wounded_.

'Which wounded?'

_I've been patching up that guy who was bleeding, the one you said you couldn't kill._

'You mean Zsasz? You've been patching up _Zsasz_?'

_Yup. Took about five stitches to close up his throat, and twenty in his arm_.

'And you did that with a needle and thread someone had on hand for reattaching buttons on their shirt?'

_Not quite. I did it with a needle and thread for reattaching buttons on a coat. They're thicker and sturdier_.

'But they're not sterile!'

_No, no, it's cool. I used almost all of a big bottle of iodine on him, just to make sure_.

'What did you give him for the pain?' I asked, starting to get worried. Had the conventions of Story warped Jay's personality to fit that of a Hero?

_....Aw, darn it! I **knew** I forgot something_. His mental voice told me he was putting me on. _I never tried 'doing good' before, so is it that much of a surprise that I'd mess something up? It's okay, though. He passed out on me after a while. Of course, I, uh, kinda had to kneel on him to get him to hold still_.

What a relief. Jay was fine. Nothing had messed with his personality at all; he had simply engaged in some recreational semi-torture involving a blunt needle, heavy thread, possibly the most painful disinfectant known to medicine, and Zsasz, who deserved it.

_Oh, yeah. For some reason he kept yelling, uh, "Not my brains! Don't eat my brains!" You got any insight into that?_

'He probably thought you were a zombie...Hey! I've finally come out somewhere!' I could see a hallway below me, and a guard--the same guard who had told me to get somewhere safe. I was back where I started. He was wrestling with a pair of airlock doors, and as I turned solid to kick the grate off, I saw it open. He ran through at full speed, a klaxon blaring--. And there, just inside the doors, were three sets of teeth. We were back on Other Joker's trail.

I relayed this to Jay, and sent one of my ghost lights to lead him through the duct. Meanwhile, I jumped down to follow wherever the teeth might lead me, mentally changing back into Arkham scrubs as I did so.

Where they led was to 'Decontamination'. Behind a viewing window, I could see a cloud of green vapor rise up inside the room like a bathtub filling up, and the sound of horrible, humorless laughter. "Oh, God, no!" screamed the guard. In the verdigris-colored mist, I could see human forms convulsing and jerking--before collapsing.

"Environmental Toxins Detected," said the bland female voice that seemed to do all the taped announcements, "Quarantine Mode Engaged." A second shield slid down in front of both door and window.

"What is wrong? What is that gas?" I asked him.

"It's Joker Toxin--it's poisonous. I don't know what to do--they're all dying in there!"

I looked up--at an open maintenance hatch. "Boost me up!" I ordered him. Jay had said it was my job to do all the heroic stuff, and this qualified.

"What?"

"Up, up!" He got the idea. There was another duct in that area, and it led into the upper area of Decontamination. Joker Toxin, whatever it was, (Jay would probably know or at least be able to guess) was heavier than air; it took an awful lot to fill the room and it wasn't uniformly thick. As it rose up toward the high ceiling, it thinned out considerably. Several guards had managed to get up on high cabinets or into the scaffolding that supported the ductworks and the lights, with varying degrees of stability.

"Help me! I'm gonna fall!" called the nearest, who was clinging onto the scaffolding for dear life. I pulled him up, then made a running leap onto the next duct just in time to see a ladder tear loose and smash into something that exploded with a shower of sparks and a cloud of smoke--leaving a guard dangling from the next highest level.

"Hang on, Steve!" shouted another guard.

"I can't! I'm slipping!"

" Hang on! Nurse--you're light, you won't break the catwalk. There's an extraction point at the other end of the room. Steve was trying to get to it." I nodded, ran up the ladder on the other side, saved Steve's butt, then leapt down to the next scaffold, where a Blackgater was also hanging on.

"I can't believe they left me here!" he complained.

I let him hang while I quickly scanned the room. A guard had collapsed while trying to reach a glass-fronted switch box, which looked more like an extraction point than anything else I could see. Taking off a Shoe, I let fly.

It went straight to the box, broke the glass, and started a series of powerful fans going. A moment later, the recorded voice said, "Air purity returning to normal levels. Quarantine mode disengaged."

The guards gave me a cheer as I jumped down and retrieved my Shoe, which was none the worse for wear. "Come on down!" I yelled. "CPR! Crash cart! Oxygen!" There were at least two dozen dead and dying men in the room, guards and prisoners alike. I have, thanks to my supernatural nature, a unique insight into who can be resuscitated and who can't, and a talent for successful resuscitation. Something I learned from Death--how to see when brain death hasn't happened yet. I can't heal, I can't cure, I can't make a bullet in a vital organ go away. As I said, I have only a few tricks, but I make do.

The next fifteen to twenty minutes were very busy. The guards not only found the oxygen, they found something better, one of the staff psychiatrists, an older woman verging on elderly by the name of Dr. Gretchen Whistler, who was of course also an MD. We started working together. Jay wandered in, and raised the guards' hackles until I told them he was with me. I lost track of what he was doing while I helped the doctor, but I do remember him poking around into various cabinets and areas, saying things like, "Ah, crystal violet! Potassium permanganate...What else have they got? Hey, the guys in, uh, red have knives."

Eventually, all the bodies were sorted out into the living and the dead. Not everyone who was dead had died of the gas; shell casings littered the floor, testament to the gun battle that had gone on. I looked down at a very dead Blackgater who was younger than I was when I died, his face covered in clown make-up and his body covered in gang tattoos. What had it all been for, really? Had someone loved him? Would anyone miss him?

"Miss Chen?" Dr. Whistler put her hand on my shoulder. "Coffee?" She held out a cup.

I could eat and drink while I was tangible, although I had no idea what happened to it later as bodily functions had become more or less optional for me. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. Please, sit down. Are you by chance related to Dr. Adrian Chen, over in Medical?" she asked as we took seats.

Uh-oh. I _had_ to pick the same last name as someone on staff. "Not that I know of. There are many people named Chen in China." I had maintained my accent throughout. Dr. Whistler had an accent herself; German, I thought.

"I see. What department are you with? I do not think you can have been here long." She seemed like a very nice lady.

"I am a lab tech, and you are right. I have been here only a little more than three weeks." I answered, hoping she wasn't going to check it out. "I was sent over to pick up some samples when...everything happened."

"I'm sorry that you were caught in this. Do you like working in the laboratory, Miss Chen?" Dr. Whistler sipped her coffee, watching me.

"I--it is a good job, and I am grateful to have it and grateful to be able to work here in America and support my family."

"You can be honest with me. Please."

I knew a little about jobs like that. "It is not as I expected--not this place nor the work itself. It is more dull than I thought. Also I do not like the schedule I work very much--and I have worked extra shifts when I was needed, but when I got paid, the money was not there. If I am paid for the hours that is one thing, but to work sixty hours and be paid for forty is--exploitation. But if I complain I may get fired. I do not want to be fired."

"You won't be. Miss Chen, I heard from the young man with the--" Dr. Whistler gestured at her face, meaning Jay's scars, "that you fought off Zsasz and went unharmed, and then I know you came right here and without hesitation, came into a room full of poison gas, cleared it, and then began triage. Someone with such resourcefulness and ability is _wasted_ as a lab tech. I have the power to choose my staff, Miss Chen. I would very much like for you to work here in Intensive Therapy. Whatever extra training you need, I can arrange with the Wayne Foundation, or if you need help with Immigration, that too can be arranged. There of course would be a raise in pay, and greater flexibility in your schedule. Also I promise that you would be paid for any overtime."

I looked into the depths of my coffee. How would Bing Qing Chen (the full name I had imagined) answer? "I would like that very much, but I think that must wait until we live to see tomorrow."

Someone rapped on the wall above my head. "Hey, Sassy Girl. What do you, uh, _think_?"

I looked up. There stood Jay, in his full make-up, white face, black around the eyes, red smeary lips, malevolent and magnificent all at once. And he was wearing a dark, so dark it was almost black, purple suit with a light purple shirt.

TBC...

* * *

A/N: So how did he do it? Perceptive readers will find clues in the chapter.

Thanks for the reviews!


	8. A Legend In The Making

To say that the Arkham people were shocked is a gross understatement. I can only assume that they had developed some kind of ingrained panic response to the combination of green(ish) hair, a purple suit and a dead white complexion. Instantly Jay was at the center of a ring of gun muzzles, their safety catches off, and the guards behind those guns had gone almost as white as his make-up.

"Ah-ta-ta-ta," he said, waggling a finger at them, and then pointing his finger at them each in turn. "Ree-lax, people, relax. I know it's already been a rough night, and it's probably gonna, uh, get rougher, but shooting little ol' me won't do you any good. I'm not the guy who's putting you through the wringer here."

"Then why are you—?" Dr. Whistler asked.

"Why am I dressed and made up like this? Short answer: To piss Bozo off. Longer answer—this is about him and me, and tonight one of us throws down. Which one—you'll have to wait and see. He didn't see this one coming—all his plans were set up with the Batman in mind. He wasn't expecting us."

"'Us'?" she asked.

I stood up. "Thank you for making me that offer, Dr. Whistler, and if I were who I said I was, I'd say yes." I didn't add that given the general disorder, filth, and wretched mismanagement of this institution, I would not work there for any money. "But I'm not."

I shifted from Arkham scrubs and nurse shoes to the party dress and the natural state of the Shoes. Then I went further, through my murder and death, and I did _not_ leave a good-looking corpse. Boiling will do that to you. "I used to be a normal person, but that was before I met Dr. Crane. Now I'm the stuff of nightmares." True, but in a different universe...

"But you'll always be_ my_ dream girl," Jay mugged, putting an arm around my waist and drawing me to him.

"Thank you, my gallant prince of baloney," I snarked at him, just before he planted a big kiss on my lips in the classic Hollywood fashion, despite how I currently looked. (I could hear some of the guards making 'Eeeeww' noises in the background, but others had whipped out their camera phones and were taking pictures.) It was a good kiss, the knee-weakening kind, the kind that usually led to more.

The mood was broken immediately. "When you say, 'throw down', do you mean that you intend to kill him?" Dr. Whistler asked, her aged face severe.

"Kill him? No, I don't _intend_ to kill him. Not that it might not, uh, happen, you never know. I intend to _break_ him. Killing him would be much too easy—and no fun."

"No fun?," asked a guard, "You think something like that ought to be fun—say, who _are_ you?"

"Aaah, names, names," Jay brushed it off, "Jay, like the bird, is good enough. And this is my wife Grace. As for who I am—well, do you think it was chance that she and I wound up here the same night that Bozo got dragged back? Do you think I'm challenging him on a whim?"

'That is exactly what you're doing, smart-ass.' I told him mentally. 'Don't think I'm not keeping track.'

_Yeah, but __**they**__ don't know. I'm putting together a legend here, sassy girl. And they are going to eat it up_.

He was right. I heard one guard say to another behind us "—it has to be the Joker's son, I mean, not that they look that much alike but—."

Another whispered conversation:"—how come we've never heard of this guy or seen him before—."

"How old is the Joker? I know nobody knows but he has to be at least forty-five, fifty. This kid looks like he's on the young side of thirty, so maybe—."

"—everybody knows some people wind up with weird powers where most wind up dead, that could be what happened to her with the fear gas, and they found each other. And _she's_ all right, you saw what she did—."

"—I can believe the Joker would cut his kid's face open like that, he'd think it was funny—."

Jay cut through all the rumor and innuendo. "I'm going after him, and whatever goons of his happen to get in the way, that's their tough luck. I'm not after any of the Arkham staff or guards, unless they're double dipping for him. You have nothing to fear from me. I give you my word—and I am a man of my word."

"He is," I confirmed. "I've never known him to break it deliberately, and if circumstances force it, he goes to any length to make it good." Such as killing someone named 'Harvey' and another named 'Dent' when he said 'Harvey Dent' would die, but they didn't need to be burdened with such details right now.

A few of the guards were nodding now, looking more secure. A few were even smiling. Dr. Whistler was not. "What you are proposing is not only wrong but dangerous. Unhealthy, too, in many ways. Yet I think you know this already, and I do not have the power to stop you."

Abruptly the airlock doors at the far end of the room opened, and over the loudspeaker we heard other Joker grouse, "I'm getting tired of waiting around for you two. Will you get a move on? I haven't got all night!" Beyond the door were, yes, more chattering teeth, and a neon green arrow spray painted on the floor.

"You ready?" Jay asked me.

I nodded.

The guards were clapping and cheering for us as the door locked behind us.

"So," I began as we followed both teeth and arrows down the corridor, "you got the make-up off one of the Blackgaters with a clown face, I guessed that."

"Uh-huh. One of them had the tubes in his pocket." Jay replied. "Plus with all the knives I got off the bodies, my pocket lint isn't lonesome anymore."

"And you dyed your suit and your shirt with the stains they keep around for prepping slides of cells, I figured that out too—but how did you get it all dry so fast?"

"You should have taken a better look around that room, sassy girl. They had all _kinds_ of stuff for killing germs—not to mention their hosts. There were microwave chambers and autoclaves, radiation booths, all kinds of funny stuff. _My_ kind of funny stuff, the kind that, uh, _hurts_ more than it cures. Not in what you'd call apple-pie order, either. Oh—and I also threw this together."

He took out of his pocket—a weird spray gun with a pressurized canister on it. "In about twenty minutes, once the mix has a chance to, uh, emulsify, it'll be a gel that explodes about thirty seconds after you spray it on something. It's not that strong, though. It won't blow up a well-made wall, but if it's coming apart already, that'll be enough. It'll knock a guy down, but it won't blow off his foot or anything else. I thought it might, uh, come in handy."

"You might be right," I replied. "You just threw that together with materials they had there in Decontamination?"

"I just have a knack for it, that's all."

"Blah-blah-blah-blah!" interrupted Other Joker. "You're_ keeping_ me _waiting_, and _I don't like it_!"

Wherever it was he was leading us, we had reached it. There was a neon green Joker face stenciled on the floor in front of the doors.

* * *

A/N: So the next chapter of 'Crashing' will also be posted under 'Can't' with the info that further chapters will be found only here. The confusion overrules the convenience. Thanks for the reviews, if any!


	9. Icing On The Cake

A/N: Well, I asked and you responded. This is the last chapter of the crossover story-within-a-story that will be posted in CGYOOMH. All subsequent chapters will be posted as a separate fic under a new title, Involuntary Man's Laughter (was briefly Crashing The Party.) If you would like to continue reading about Jay and Grace's adventures in Game!Arkham, be sure to bookmark, fav, alert, whatever Involuntary Man's Laughter. Why did I change it? Well, it doesn't work very well if you say it out loud, but if you take out the apostrophe and shove the last two words togther, you get Involuntary Manslaughter. Which I thought was clever.

Oh, and I added a link to an anime clip on Youtube to my profile. Check it out!

* * *

Before us lay another large, grim room like the elevator lobby, with two guard stations, their force field doors still powered up. Several dead men lay around on the floor. A guard rail divided the room in two: beyond it was a deep drop off. In the center of the open area, something like a bank vault hung from the ceiling on heavy chains. Other Joker stood on top of the bank vault, and as we entered, he uncrossed his ankles and stood tall, squaring his shoulders. "What took you so lon—" he sneered, but stopped when he saw Jay clearly. "Oh, so that's how you're going to play this! _Copy-cat_!"

"Uh-huh." Jay said. "Except from my point of view, I'm, um, _not_ copying, and I would never—_could_ never wear my pants that tight. I'm not surprised you can, though." He shook his head, but the subtle implication—that Other Joker was _not_ anatomically correct, so to speak,—passed right over the other clown's head. "And that, uh, giggle gas of yours? More kitch, like those plastic teeth."

"What's wrong with my happy gas?" Other Joker snapped, offended.

"Well, to, uh, explain, I've got to start with a metaphor. It's like cake. Cake is good on its own, but frosting is good, too, so you put some on it and make it extra, uh, yummy. Real frosting, that is, made of simple stuff like butter and sugar and extract. Then somebody decides to get fancy with the frosting, and they put all these swirly blobs around the cake, and maybe make roses, and that's okay too, but then they take it further, and the next thing you, uh, know, there's a 3-D replica of, uh, Washington crossing the Delaware on top the cake, and because butter melts too easy, they make the icing out of all this fake shit with stabilizers and preser-vatives and food coloring that tints your shit funny colors—never eat anything that doesn't get digested on the way through, that's my rule—and artificial flavors, and nobody likes it."

While Jay offhandedly delivered his build up to a blistering critique of Other Joker's work, I took a moment to look at the two of them in the same frame, and it was hard to choose between the two as to which was the more disturbing. Other Joker had the advantage of just looking so strange—his height and thinness alone made him stand out, and his face only added to it, with his long, long chin, let alone his coloration--he was like a portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec. Deformed himself by a bone disease, Lautrec could look at a beautiful young singer and draw her as a simpering, leering corrupted old harridan. Some similar alchemy was at work in the person of Other Joker. Like a two-headed kitten, the sight of him brought on an involuntary shiver of revulsion.

But Jay, who could wash his face and walk almost unnoticed in the everyday world, was equally disquieting. It was partly the scars, of course, and the slouchy way he stood, rounding his shoulders into almost a hunchback, but also his mannerisms and idiosyncratic way of speaking. Add to that his smeary, slap-dash make-up, not to mention that aura of personality, a power all its own, and a different sort of wrongness crept up on you, an intellectual horror, because for all of that he _was _human. He was human, and he might kill someone because he thought it would make for a good joke, and that was horrible. For all that I cared about him, I never forgot or tried to excuse what he was.

"Will you get to the point?" Other Joker needled.

"That's what I'm do-ing," Jay told him. "Your gas is, uh, like the fake frosting--it's crap, only you can't scrape it off and just eat the cake. When you decided people should literally die laughing, you traded effectiveness for effect. That pea-soup fog is barely toxic. How many cannisters did it take to fill that room? Ten? And most of the guys _lived_. My wife's, uh, accessories are more dangerous than that!"

"Well! If you don't like my happy gas, here's something of mine that might impress you a bit more." His voice dropped to a whisper of menace, and he kicked open a catch which in turn opened the 'vault.'

Something inside roared. A massive head and mismatched set of shoulders muscled out, and then it leapt toward us, landing squarely on the floor. "Ooooh, he's a big one, isn't he?" cooed Other Joker.

He wasn't wrong. The first word that sprang to my mind was _grotesque_, followed by _huge_ and _toxic mutant gorilla_. Covered in livid green pustules and about eight feet tall, it looked like something Dr. Frankenstein might have made while badly hungover. Its right shoulder and arm were thick and lumpy with muscle, while the left were normal sized. Conversely, its left leg was like a tree trunk, straining the dirty canvas pants it wore, while its right was only a twig in comparison. Feral green eyes looked out at the world from under a brow like a shelf, and two bony ridges ran back over its skull. Wheezing, it beat its chest, gorilla-fashion, and roared at us again.

'What is it?' I asked.

_What are you asking me for? I dunno. A really weird case of that Elephant Man disease, maybe?_ While we were communicating, the thing shuffled over to the nearest dead guard, picked up the body, and slung it at us.

Jay jumped aside. _What I want to know is, how do we kill it? I don't, uh, know if my knives are long enough to reach any vital organs on that thing._

Seeing that throwing bodies had no effect, the creature charged. It was big and fast, but not especially agile; Jay leapt and rolled out of its way, and I simply went intangible. 'Ugh, did you see its spine?' I asked as Jay pulled himself up again. The vertebra had sprouted up into bony spikes that broke the skin, revealing raw and angry meat. Raw but curiously enough, not bleeding.

_Yeah. Listen, I don't think that, uh, monster is gonna live very long. It's alreadly wheezing like a two pack a day smoker, and if it's deformed like that on the outside then the inside must be worse. If it hits me it'll flatten me like a pancake, but that's, uh, not what's gonna happen_.

'Okay. You have my attention. What's the plan?'

_Did you and a friend,uh, ever play ball with a lively young dog, just to wear it out_? The behemoth beat its chest again and roared some more.

'Yes, but it was a long time ago.'

_Same idea. You're gonna go on over to that side and jump around, waving your arms and yelling to get its attention. When it charges over to you, I'll start doing the same over here. Ah, there's a fire extinguisher, good, I can use that. We'll just keep doing that until it keels over_.

So that was what we did, and it made for one of the more ludicrous battles I've ever been in, and by that time I'd been in a few. I'd holler and wave, it charged over, swinging its hands like flippers, and try to knock me around. Thanks to my intangibility, all it got was frustrated. Then Jay would do the same over on his end, sometimes spraying it in the face with extinguisher foam, which made it even clumsier, and when it had cleared its eyes, I would start in on the jumping jacks again. Although Jay did get winged once with another thrown corpse, he wasn't hurt badly, and after about five or six locomotive charges, it was staggering around the floor with fatigue.

Suddenly it stopped and clapped both hands to its head where large green veins pulsed like they were about to burst. Then it reeled a few steps, grabbed its chest and fell over backward. I could hear its death rattle from clear across the room.

"Well, that was unexpected, wasn't it?" Other Joker asked cheerfully. "Note to self: Need to choose stronger test subjects."

"Shoddy work again," Jay said under his breath, but Other Joker was already burbling on.

"Seeing as how I'm feeling generous, I'll give you this one for free." He let go of the chains and stepped up to the front of the vault, spreading his arms as if for his crucifixion. "Knock me off, I dare you. Kill me. Pull the plug. End this for once and for all!"

Jay shrugged. "Okay," and let fly with a knife, which hit Other Joker in the shoulder and stuck there.

"AAahh!" Other Joker cried out, and nearly did fall. "You hit me! You stabbed me!" He sounded more outraged than hurt as he pulled the knife out. A dark stain appeared on his jacket and slowly spread out.

"You did, uh, ask for it," Jay pointed out, reasonably enough.

"So I did," growled Other Joker. "I won't make that mistake again. I'd just _love_ to stay and chat with you about that, but I have to run. I've got a party to organize. There'll be plenty of other guests flying in from all over Arkham who are just dying to meet _you_, to be sure. You'll see..." The vault which hung from the chains began to move backward, away from us, running on tracks in the ceiling. "You'll see." A pair of massive doors slid apart to admit the vault and clanged shut behind it.

We looked at each other. "Is it just me, or does it seem like he's reading lines from a different script than we are?" I asked.

"One with Batsy as his, uh, sparring partner. But I think he's gonna rework it in a hurry."

There were signs of life in one of the guard booths. "Hey--is someone there?" a young man's voice asked.

"Yes," I called back.

"...okay. Lemme get the security field down before any of them come back."

"So was this a human being?" I toed the huge body on the floor. "He did say 'stronger test subjects',"

"Unless gorillas have started tattooing 'Mom' on their arms, I'd, _uh_, say yes." Jay knelt down and twisted one arm until the markings showed. "And the pants are the same as the ones the Blackgaters are wearing. Don't go getting het up about it, sassy girl. This guy was dead from the moment Bozo gave him the stuff, whatever it was. I gotta say that if this is all he's got, tonight is going to be a disappointment."

"I think not." I disagreed. "There is Scarecrow--and Killer Croc. Who knows what else or who else he's got in his holster?"

TBC....as always.


	10. Well, Isn't That A Bitch?

A/N: Perceptive readers will have noticed that this story has undergone a name change. I thought that Involuntary Man's Laughter was more appropriate. I may make another change and undo the crossover. There's more traffic in the regular section.

* * *

Predictably, the guard did a double take at the sight of my handsome features, but he recovered enough to tell us that Bozo had gone off into what they called 'Extreme Isolation'. When I said that Gracie and I wanted to go there, he said that would be no problem (which I doubted right off) but that he would have to call another unit. No surprise, the guard radio was down and he was helpless.

"Okay," I said, "there's this invention you might have heard of. It's uh, called a 'cell phone.'" I made air quotes as I said it. "You can use it to call other people. Even if Bozo not only has the guard radio sewed up but the land lines cut too," (which I doubted. Too much of that goes underground.). "I know I didn't see a cell, uh, tower on the island, so he can't have bollixed that up as well. You should still be able to call out. Have you thought of trying that?"

He had the grace to go red with shame, but whatever he might have wanted to say to me was lost to history because the monitor lit up right then, and there was Bozo, who had his jacket off and his shirt pulled aside to bandage the little boo-boo I gave him. Which was no treat for us, as he was just as white under his clothes, I noticed, and not only was he bony as a living X-ray, what muscle he did have was like loose rope hanging slack in his skin.

"Having a little trouble up there?" he asked, maliciously.

"As far as I'm concerned, trouble is something that only happens to other people," I replied.

"I can believe that," he scowled. "Spare me your juvenile attempts at wit. I have something your wife might be interested in seeing. Watch the screen."

The picture cut to an office, where Commissioner Gordon was standing with his back to the camera. As we watched, Boles the drunk came up on him from behind and laid him out with a nightstick applied to the back of the head, and then took another belt of liquor.

Cut back to Bozo. "You see that, honeycakes?" ('Honeycakes?' Gracie mouthed with disgust.) "Commissioner Gordon is on his way to Harley even as we speak. Now your husband might not care, but I caught some of your Angel of Mercy act, and I know that _you_ do, so listen up. In half an hour, Gordon dies. Unless you rescue him first. Got that? I don't think you'll be able to get to him in time, but watching you suffer when you fail will be quite amusing. Harley's looking forward to offing the old man.—Maybe I'll film it and post it on the internet!" He laughed.

"You see, I don't want you catching up with me just yet, either of you. In case your hubby gets any funny ideas about leaving you on your own, let me just say that among my boys are some particularly violent sex offenders, and if they meet up with _you_—Whoo-hoo! Bye-bye for now!" The screen went black.

Gracie looked at me and opened her mouth to speak, but I got in first.

"I already know what your answer's going to be," I said. "I'm coming with you. Not that you need any help from me, but because I don't want to miss what's, uh, going to happen, one way or another."

"I have no idea what's going on here," the guard interrupted, "but there's no way I can get Extreme Isolation open. The best I can do is open the door you came in by."

"I'll, uh, settle for that. What do you say, Sassy Girl? What's the next move?"

"If I were Harley, I'd get Gordon out of the building and into another location," she answered. "But I have no idea about the layout of the island."

"It seems, uh, to me that I recall there being pamphlets and promotional materials lying about the lobby by the holding cells, back where Boles sapped Gordon. I bet they have maps of all the major stuff."

"Then let's go back there and get one," she decided.

"Fine with me." We left the room to head back to where we started.

Along the way, we ran into a couple of expendables. They had propped a doctor up against the wall and put a bucket over his head with a Happy Face spray painted on it and were now bragging about how they had killed the one guard. Both had sections of pipe, which can make a nasty weapon.

"Not so big and strong now, are you?" one jeered.

The other said, "Didja see how those teeth flew when I hit him in the mouth? Hell, I bet his whole family felt that! Lemme go for the rest of them!" He drew back his arm to hit the dead guy again when I stepped up.

"You, uh, oughtta treat corpses with a little more respect," I said, startling them.

"Huh? Why?" asked one.

"Because you're going to be one," I told them, and went for a twofer. Sideways into the gut, up about a foot into the pulmonary sacs, and finishing up with jabs into the auditory canals. "Hee-hee! Black red stomach blood, bright red lung blood, and pink foam from the ears all mean a long dirt nap, and I got three for three on both of them." I told Grace, while the stricken goons looked at their own bodily fluids with rapidly unfocusing eyes.

"I think I could have gone through eternity without knowing that," she said. "May I make a suggestion for next time, though?"

"You can get suggestive any time you like," I said, giving her the ol' twinkle.

"Hentai! No, what I had in mind was this: Next time, and as we run into more of these goons in the future, what if you just maim some of them, but leave them alive so the word can get around that you don't play nice like Batman? Otherwise it might take them a while to figure it out."

"--Interesting point. I'll, uh, think about it." Passing through the connecting loop, we found the lobby, where there were not only maps of Arkham Island but three sets of chattering teeth and a phone ringing off the hook.

"Is anybody there?" a woman's voice came from the speaker. "I'm trying to reach Steve. Is he there?"

"Hold on one moment. I'll see if I can find him," Bozo said in falsetto.

"Oh, thank you! Thank you so much," she said with relief.

"I'm sorry. I looked everywhere, but I can only find his head! I'll get back to you once I find the rest of him!" he roared with laughter, and the connection cut off there. I was right; there _were_ still telecommunications on the island.

"Charming," Gracie said in disgust. "Okay, this is Intensive Treatment, in what they call Arkham North. Arkham East has the Botanical Gardens and Arkham Mansion, Arkham West has the Medical Building, the Penitentiary, and the Visitor's Center. Do you suppose the Gift Shop is in the Visitor's Center, or in the Mansion?"

"The what?" I asked.

"Every time I ever visited anywhere this fancy, they had a gift shop. What does a mental institution need a botanical garden for, anyway?"

"Beats me. Guess it came with the place. Let's, uhm, focus on getting up to the surface first. How do we do that?" I looked at the map. "Interior map of Intensive Treatment, good. We're nine levels underground, and the only ways out are--can this be right? Just the main entrance where we came in? That's not so good."

"There's an exit to the sewers on the next level down." Grace studied the map, "but I can't tell where it leads out. I know there are fire stairs, but--there are a lot of stairs."

"Well, I'm not climbing nine flights of stairs," I said, emphatically. "And _I_ can't drift off anywhere I want to, like, uh, you can, so that leaves the elevators, which should be through those doors there."

I was right; the elevators were right through there, although neither car was on our level. A guard was punching call buttons and grousing. "Stupid, unreliable--What the hell is wrong with--?"

Smack! Harley Quinn touched down on the counterweight of the left hand elevator like an olympic gymnast, which for all I knew she was. "Uh-uh-uh! Mistah J. said not to make it easy for--Hey! What are you ripping off his style for? Never mind, if I talk to you you'll make me lose my place again. Mistah J. said not to make it easy for you, so--." She pushed a key on a remote in her hand, and _Whoomp!_ blew an explosive charge on the cable. As she flew up in the air, hanging on the end of it and cackling like a witch, the elevator car came down and smashed like an egg.

The guard got knocked out by flying debris, but I leapt out of the way. When my ears stopped ringing, I got up and looked at the mess. "Well, isn't that a bitch?" I asked rhetorically.

"The woman and the predicament both," Gracie agreed.

"I repeat: I am not climbing nine flights of stairs. Ya know, if it were Batman in the situation, he'd have some handy-dandy little gadget to deal with this problem, but I'm not him. However, there is another elevator, and if I can't hotwire it you can shove an onion up my ass and call me a turkey. Only thing is, I need you to go on up and have a look for any more explosives first."

"All right."

"That's my girl." I peeled open the control panel and yanked wires loose while listening for her "All Clear." When I had it, I crossed the correct ones and waited for my ride.


	11. Elevate My Mind

I maintain that what happened at the top of the elevator was not my fault; Jay snickers and says that it was, because I knew some of the Blackgaters were armed, and I had even told Two-Face once that given a fifty-fifty chance, most people made the wrong decision ninety percent of the time.

What happened was--this is difficult to admit, but here is how it happened. I was checking out the elevator for explosives while Other Joker was going on about Frank Boles, the alcoholic turncoat. "I bet you're wondering how I did it. Frankie and me go way back. I got him out of... a spot of bother a few years ago." (I could guess what form the 'spot of bother' took. Probably vehicular homicide--in other words, he killed someone in a drunk driving accident.) "So when I need security codes or an old man clubbed to the ground, I just call on him."

Other Joker went on to play a recording of Boles betraying his colleagues, ordering them to cover the entrance because Joker's army was storming the front gates. Then he shot them in the back.

By then I was wondering if somehow I could extend my lawful prey to include people who killed their workplace 'family'. At the same time, Jay had summoned the elevator. I thought it would be a good idea to cover the sounds it was making, because there were five Blackgaters loitering around the elevator lobby on the top floor, armed with pipes and full of spunk. To distract them, I started off with an ominous croaking sound, and...well, by the time I reached the top, I was climbing the wall spider-fashion at high speed, with four arms and four legs to carry out the theme. (All illusory, of course.) Plus there was my natural ghostly phosphorescence, and I'd added a few extra pairs of eyes and another mouth or two. There might have been slavering involved as well. Who doesn't get carried away once in a while?

All in all, I guess I looked pretty terrifying when I burst up out of the pit and landed among them. Even big strong Death Row inmates can panic, and some of them have surprisingly girly screams. There were two locked doors leading out of the elevator area, and as it happened, one of them led to an empty corridor, while the other led to three convicts with firearms and orders to kill anyone who came through that door. (There were also two Arkham guards between the door and the firing squad, crouching behind a compressor and fresh out of ammo, certain they were about to die, but that's beside the point.)

Which door did the five Blackgaters unlock, given that there was safety behind one and certain death behind the other?

Just guess.

Not Door Number One.

Jay arrived while two very surprised and very thankful guards were confiscating firearms and handcuffing the three shooters. To their credit, the killers were genuinely upset about having shot their own men, although since that may have been motivated more by fear of Other Joker than by remorse. Once he found out what had happened, Jay started teasing.

"And you have the nerve to complain about me!"

* * *

A/N: An extra short-short, just for fun. A longer and meatier chapter next time.


	12. Dead Ends

A/N: I don't know if any of my readers also happen to be Diana Gabaldon fans, but if you are and you've missed the furor of the last couple of weeks, you should know that she doesn't want anyone writing fics based on her works. Fair enough. However, she extends her dislike to all fanfic and made her position quite clear in a couple of blogs which have since been removed. Nothing ever really goes away on the internet, however, so it's still possible to find and read what she wrote, and it's quite insulting to everyone who writes and/or reads fanfic. Actually, it's quite insulting to anyone who thinks.

Is there anybody (besides Ms. Gabaldon) out there who believes that if you simply change all the names the story will be a brand new original story? Oh, if it were only that easy! If you've written the characters right, the Joker will still be the Joker, Arkham Asylum will still be Arkham Asylum, and Gotham City will still be Gotham City.

Obviously I'm preaching to the choir here, but she seems to have ignored the fact that fanfic writers and readers _buy books_. And that we're internet savvy. And that there are a lot of us. Plus, does fanfic seem to have hurt J.K. Rowling?

Psh. Enough of that.

* * *

'Did you get the key card off the body?' Gracie called to mentally from the other end of the hallway. This was just after the guards took both the living and the dead Blackgaters down to level nine.

_What key card?_

'I'll take that as a "no". This door is locked, that's the prob—Jay, there's another one.'

_Another what? Another locked door, another key card—._

'Another goon with a gun. There's a flight of stairs off this hall, and I can hear him talking to the Other Joker.'

_Want me to deal with this one, since you obviously don't know your own strength? _I strolled down the hall to the bottom of the stairs. Yep, there was someone up there.

'Will you shut the hell up about that already?' Even her mental voice was frazzled, and the fact that I'd got her to swear meant I'd really gotten to her. So I laughed and crept up the stairs. The room, which was only a small grey concrete box, seemed to be a guard post, with banks of surveillance equipment and so on. Plus more stacks of patient files. Was there anywhere in this place that wasn't littered with files? The goon, another ugly, muscle-bound no-brainer, had his back to me, and was talking to Bozo on a walkie-talkie while four big monitors showed the responses.

"No problem, Boss. We're just finishing up here. (Was he ever clueless!) Those Arkham chumps never stood a chance!" Grace came up under my elbow and watched him along with me.

"Good. Now, about those two. You need to set a trap. They must not leave this building! Do you understand?" Bozo glared at him in quadruplicate.

"Uh, yeah. They're as good as dead." The expendable shifted uneasily from foot to foot, balancing his machine gun on his hip. The little light that there was glinted off his shaven head.

"I certainly hope you keep your promises, boy. I would hate to have to go find your family to teach you a lesson—and I can promise you they won't be laughing!"

"But, Joker!"

"Ah-ah—no buts! Just do it!" Bozo grinned. "And have fun. I know I will." The screens went to static, then to the Arkham logo.

I had snuck up behind him, and now I put a knife to his throat. "Gracie, did I, uh, ever tell you I can see the future?"

"You've mentioned it, yes. Why? What do you see now?" she asked, wide-eyed Ah, that was one of the great things about her, her sense of comic timing. She knew how and when to feed me the right lines.

"I see that our friend here is gonna, uh, _ease _that gun of his down nice and slow—and that you're gonna to take it _and _that key card I see, uh, clipped to his shirt. Then he's gonna sit down on the floor and not give me any trouble." The thug was smart enough to know what was good for him.

"Very good!" I put my knife away for the moment and clapped twice to applaud him. "Now, to show my ah-_ppre_ciation, I'm gonna show you a magic trick."

"Oh, no. Please,_ not_ the pencil trick!" my sassy girl moaned.

"No. How would I do the pencil trick? I haven't got a pencil on me right now. What I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna show you how I can stand on one finger."

Bozo chose that moment to light up the screens again. "Oh." he said sourly. "There you are—what are you doing?"

"Shh! I'm in the middle of something here. I'm gonna need some _audience participation_ here—how about you, sir? Yes, you in the convict's garb. What say you, uh, help me out here? Remember that I'm armed to the teeth and Gracie has your gun."

He nodded. "_That's_ a good murderer. You're smarter than you look—which, uh, can't be hard. I want you to choose the spot where I do my trick. Show me where I'm gonna stand on _one finger_ and one finger _on-ly_. I don't want anyone saying I cheated."

"Uh—there," he pointed.

"There?" I pointed to the wrong place.

"No. There," He pointed again.

"Are you, uh, sure? Show me _exactly_," I looked at him questioningly.

"There," he tapped the floor.

I stomped on his finger with both feet, and the bones crunched. He yelled in pain.

"See? I _can_ stand on one finger. I just, uh, never said it would be _my_ finger," I sniggered, and kicked him hard in the jaw, knocking him out. "Act-ually, just the one seems, uh, kinda lopsided. Lemme get the oth-er hand..." I stomped the other index finger as well.

"_He _won't be pulling any triggers for a while," my wife observed. "Nice work."

"_Thank _you, sassy girl."

"_What_ are you doing?" Bozo repeated. He'd been babbling all through my trick—how rude!

"Y'know, it's not enough that you aren't paying, uh, attention, but do you have to talk all through the performance?"

"You are _beginning_ to get on my _nerves_," he groused.

"Just beginning?" Gracie asked. "I'd have thought we were there and back again by now."

"Speaking of, uh, beginnings," I cut him off before he could comment, "how far are we into this little shindig you had planned for Batman?"

"What?"

"C'mon, you must have some idea. Are we half-way? A quarter of the way?"

"Not that far. You've only just started. These have been the_ easy_ ones."

"I should hope so," I retorted, "because if that's the best you've got, that's sad."

"Oh, you have no idea what else is coming," he chuckled evilly.

"You still didn't answer my, uh, _question_. How far _are_ we? Give me a percent."

"All right—Five percent. Happy now."

"Five percent," I rolled it around on my tongue. "And how many guys did you start out with?"

"About two hundred and fifty," he snapped. "Where are you going with this?"

"Two hundred and fifty," I had to laugh, great whooping guffaws. "Two hundred and fifty. That's funny. Ooh hoo! Let's see, there were seven in the holding cells, and, uh, even if some of them lived, I still shot them and they won't be up and around again tonight, then two in the hallway, I shot them too. That's nine. Then there was Zsasz, that makes ten. Gracie took care of him, and what, uhm, with him seeing zombies and sharks and maybe even zombie sharks all over the place, _he's_ under heavy sedation and wouldn't be much good to you even if he wasn't—."

"Scratch Zsasz," Gracie disagreed. "He doesn't count, because he was already here."

"Okay," I was willing to go with that, "not Zsasz. How many dead thugs were there in Decontamination, sassy girl?"

"Five or six, I think. Call it five," she offered.

"Five and nine make fourteen. Then there were two more in another hallway, that's sixteen, then thefive you, uh, took out indirectly," I added them up.

"Do you _have_ to bring that up again?" she shook her head.

"Yes, I do, 'cause that makes twenty-one, and I slashed up the feet on the three in the hall before I let the guards take them away, twenty-four. Plus this guy in here. He makes twenty-five." I let my grin stretch my scars till they threatened to tear and bleed. "Y'see, Batsy, when he's doing his thing, he only knocks them around a little. Once they come to, they're raring to go again, keen as tabasco and with, uh, twice the bite. That's_ him_, though, and I, uh, wouldn't have him any other way. _But that's not us_. Especially not me.

"Twenty-five of your guys are dead or out of, uh, commission, and that's _ten percent_ of your crew. You're five percent of the way through the night and already you're ten percent down on numbers. I_ like_ them odds. I like them a _lot_."

Bozo looked startled, and even, _maybe_, just a little bit afraid. Maybe. He recovered fast, though. "Deadwood. They needed cutting out," he sneered. "Just for that, I'm going to _warn_ the next bunch. You needn't try that key card you've got there, Missy. I already deleted it from the system."

"Warn them or not, it won't make a difference," I predicted. There was another one of those vents in the wall, and I took it off. "After you, Gracie."

A second or five later, she called back mentally, 'It's the lobby with the scanner, the one by the front entrance.'

_Great. Join you in a moment_. There were three armed expendables lurking around it, but I shot two of them while Gracie startled one into stepping backward off the top of a ladder and breaking his ankle in the process. Bozo sent three more, but it would be boring to tell how all the expendables got expended. That's what they're there for, right? Now he was thirty-one down, and counting. The upshot of it all was that while I cleaned off my knife after the last one, Gracie called to me from the entryway.

"Jay? I've found Boles."

"Good. Save a big piece of him for me."

"There's nothing left of this pie," she returned. "Only an empty crust."

The lift controls had been buggered up and were dead; I had to climb a ladder to get up to the door.

There was Boles, all right, surrounded by dead men, both guards and goons, and with three sets of teeth chattering around him. He was chained to one of those upright gurney things, with an anatomy illustration of the gluteus maximus pinned to his chest (the buttocks or ass for those who don't know any Latin, which I don't but I know _that_ anyway.) Across the picture was written 'Dead End'. He had a big green smile spray painted on his face, and if I was any judge, he'd been killed by someone pinching his nose shut and spraying paint into his mouth until he suffocated or died of paint fumes or both.

"Now _this _one I approve of," Gracie said.

"Squealers get what they get," I agreed.


End file.
